


Heart Toward the Highway

by Edwardina



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Big Bang Challenge, Clothes Fetish, Cross-Generation Relationship, Daddy Kink, Dirty Talk, F/M, Sharing Clothes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-15
Updated: 2009-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-15 00:52:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 42,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edwardina/pseuds/Edwardina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo, fresh out of high school, has left home and wound up on the road with John, trying to learn the ropes from someone who isn't exactly sharing and caring. John, distant and impatient, isn't really a partner, friend, or role model -- which means that Jo's gotta get all stupid and hot for him. Their stoic apprenticeship starts to unravel as Jo starts to run out of clothes and John can't ignore her anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for spn_j2_bigbang. This is a pre-series AU. Jo is 18.

> _"A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do, but it does not keep him from doing it."_

In Arkansas, it gets real hot. The air conditioner busts. Jo sweats against the leather seat of the truck, her hair pulled and mussed by the wind whipping in through the wide-open windows.

At a gas station, she buys a cheap pair of black wrap sunglasses and slips them on as she waits for John, who disappeared like he tends to do. It's so hot that the pavement shimmers like water, and the truck is boiling on the inside even with the windows rolled down. The pit of her back is slicked with sweat, and her jeans feel stupidly heavy, like she's been wandering through waist-high mud and now it's all layered on her, suffocating her skin.

She doesn't have much with her anymore -- less than she packed, and John's not real big on shopping unless it's for ammo and stuff. His clothes are sturdier than hers, she thinks; it's not fair. Her jeans are split at both knees, and she lost her other pair totally. Some creep at the laundromat must've taken 'em, or she must've left 'em in a motel somewhere. Either way, she's down to one pair, and they're grimy, dirty, sweaty, gross. She smells like a trucker.

John takes forever inside the run-down convenience store, but he's always running on his own time. He could be scouring a newspaper or fishing, in his grumpy, disconnected way, for information. Scouting out a case. Something like that. He always finds a lead to follow somehow.

For a few minutes, Jo watches the lonely highway through her sunglasses. Three cars go by, fast as they pass but slow as they disappear into the distance, wavering like a mirage. There are tumbleweeds stuck against one of the gas pumps.

She shifts around, leans back till her head's nestled against the shoulder of the seat, and grips absent-mindedly at the frayed hole in one knee of her jeans. It tears like paper.

"Great," she says to no one, staring at her naked knee and the gaping denim. Then, louder, "Just fucking great."

Jo leans over, huffing with the exertion and annoyance, and grabs her bag, finds her knife. _Her_ knife, the one that was her dad's. Then she cuts the fucking leg of her jeans off entirely, deft with the little blade at this point, exact in pressure, working apart the fabric until it's slumping down her calf. She shucks it like a second skin over her foot, and oh, _yeah_.

She's forgotten about John, busy snapping through the thick seams on the other leg of her jeans, when he pops open his door, clunk-squeak.

"Rghh," grunts Jo, breaking through the seam and ripping down the shorn leg.

For a second, John just stares at her unblinkingly and hulks there in the doorway. He's got a white undershirt on, his button-down slung over his shoulder. It's like seeing him naked or something; he's usually only that stripped down when he's on his way to the shower, or sitting up in some creaky motel bed, rubbing his face with both hands.

"Be careful," he says, then, stern, and slides into the driver's seat beside her.

"I gotta get new jeans," Jo replies flatly. She knows how to use a knife, dammit, and he knows it -- but some small part of her is happy when he notices anything she does at all. Sometimes he just goes all far away from her. Sometimes she might as well not even be there.

"You just ripped your only pair," says John, sounding annoyed.

"They were falling apart! And it's hot. I'm gonna wear shorts." She returns her knife to its place in her bag, unbloodied, then shifts around in her seat, enjoying her newly bare legs even though they don't catch any real breeze. She props her feet, bare (flip-flops somewhere in the foot well), up on the dashboard. She knows he hates that -- that her often-dusty feet leave prints and smears. Too bad. "Did you get me water?"

Wordlessly, still staring her way, John hands her a bottle. A glass bottle, no label. It's Coca-Cola. Jo's insides all squeeze unbearably. It's the old-fashioned kind of bottle, and it's dripping wet and icy-cold, and it's John's way of saying, _You drink what I drink._ It's horrible of him. He's always doing it, overriding her in the smallest but most irritating ways. She pulls a face at him.

"Need me to open that?" he asks. He sounds weary as he settles fully into the well-worn seat and his gaze drops from her.

"I can do it myself," says Jo.

Seems like she says stuff like that all the time.

She leans over to where the truck keys are waiting to be turned, digs in the teeth of a dangling key beneath the cap, flips it off easily -- you don't work in a tavern and not end up learning a few tricks -- into John's lap. It slides between his wide-open thighs and lands somewhere between.

Jo grins. "Have fun digging for that."

"You think you're cute," John grumbles, like it's not even a question, as Jo glugs Coca-Cola without grace, the bubbly stuff stinging somewhere in her nose. It's too sweet; she normally doesn't drink soda pop, but half the bottle's gone by the time she's done getting that cold liquid down her throat.

"Hey, I don't see you complaining," she pants, and belches unapologetically.

John opens his own bottle using the ring on his left hand. There's that merry hiss of carbonation escaping its glass confines, and then a weird pause. Jo sips some more of that sickly-sweet soda, lips wetted by it and kissing the glass rim.

Then John says, "Get your feet off the dash."

Sighing, she obeys, returning her feet to the too-warm foot well one by one, then presses the sweating bottle of Coke to her neck, where her throat shudders against the glass. It's so cold and great.

 

*

 

There are times when Jo making with the cute is totally part of the gig.

She stands at his side, fake-crying into one of John's thin old handkerchiefs (who even uses those anymore?), and the guy standing in front of the doors of the private funeral feels so bad that he lets them sneak in. She pulls on a pair of pink scrubs with dancing elephants holding bouquets of pastel balloons, grabs a clipboard, and smiles real sweet at everyone who passes by as she leads John into the intensive care ward. She braids her hair like a flash and pretends to be his daughter when they get pulled over, makes blinky-eyes at the cops and says, "Daddy? Is everything okay?" all worried and tremulous, and they get off with a warning to slow it down, get that tail light fixed, whatever.

One night after it closes down, they jimmy their way into a Copy Shack with absolutely no security -- they've got cameras mounted, but they aren't even real -- and construct her a fake ID. Twenty-one.

Twenty-one is still three years away. She barely looks fifteen. But John's such a perfectionist that it totally works, and she was born in a bar, anyway. Once she's in those doors, she's leaning over the nearest pool table and pretending to be real, real, _real_ bad at it, till eventually she can put some poor sap's twenty down her bra.

It all works all the time, and she tries as hard as hell to get him to say, "Nice job" or "Good work." That's all she ever gets, but that's all she wants. And it's hard to come by.

 

*

 

They let the A/C stay busted for near a month, and Jo wears those raggy cut-offs every day hoping John'll get the hint -- that she needs clothes. Better ones. She hasn't seen a shopping mall, or even a freakin' Sears, in ages, 'cause John likes to stick to backwater towns. He looks out of place in cities, like he's pissed off when buildings totally dwarf him, but she really wants to go to one of the big cities, just to see what all the fuss is about.

She's got the money, just not the opportunity. It's not like she wants some kind of fucked up buddy-buddy shopping day -- just new jeans, a sturdier pair of boots. But John buries his face in newspapers, grasps over his own forehead like he's trying to block her from view, tapes scraps and articles to the wall and just wanders between them like some art critic and stares at them for hours until he starts muttering stuff. It usually winds up meaning something. And Jo's job then is to just not distract him, not ask questions.

"Ah, shit," she grunts under her breath one night, dousing a scrape on her knee in hydrogen peroxide. Stuff stings, but it just catches her by surprise more than anything.

John's over at the table by the window, his usual spot in all these gritty old motels he always chooses. He's got his journal thing open in front of him and is writing with an inky pen, the kind he always uses that leaves thick letters. He's almost ritualistic about what kind of pen he uses. Whether black or blue, it's always that kind. Just like he always picks the same kind of fleabag motels, eats at the same kind of mom-and-pop diners.

Jo's legs are all kinds of scraped up right now. Her jeans had protected her skin more than she'd realized. She gouged one shin climbing over a fence. A cut on her knee's still healing up. There's gravel burn from where she tripped and fell, only for a split second, high-tailing it out of some house when John yelled for her to get out, get out _now_. She's usually got more bruises than she can even keep track of, and her shorts are getting mangled, too, fraying up till they're higher on her leg than she cut them. The seam on the inside of one leg's slowly ripping. It's taking all of her willpower to leave it alone, not help it along.

Slowly, she sticks the brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide back in the first aid tackle box, tosses away the wet and bloody tissues she was using in the offensively tiny waste basket. Throws herself down flat on the bed and looks at the ceiling, where there's a brown splotch.

"I need new jeans," she finally says, wistfully.

"Yeah," says John, not looking up.

"Did you write down the thing about the water stains?" she asks, eyeing the one on the ceiling above her. The spirit they were searching for somehow left behind massive water stains everywhere in the office building it was haunting, ruining the carpet where it stood and bloating the walls it wandered through. _What kind of spirit can do that? Make the walls drip?_ she'd wondered in the truck, as they'd taken off after a totally fruitless night of searching for it -- the EMF going off like crazy at every water stain, but nothing else ever materializing. _I don't know_ , John had said, and nothing more than that.

"I got it," he says, kind of impatiently.

It's near six in the morning, now, and there's obviously nothing else Jo can do today. She felt useless in the building. Useless in the truck. She feels useless now. She hates the feeling that nothing she's doing is helping at all, but she's learning to live by John's rules, John's moods, and it at least helps her learn more when he knows she's there to do so. Still, she kind of wishes he'd just look at her, tell her what he's writing down, share his theories.

Grumpily, she unbuttons her cut-offs and shoves them down, leaves them between their beds, and worms her way under the blanket in her panties and tank top. Doesn't matter if she's losing any semblance of modesty bit by bit. Not like anyone's looking at her.

 

*

 

When she wakes up, it's two in the afternoon and John's gone. It doesn't even look like his bed was slept in. It's not really that unusual, but it always leaves Jo feeling strange and uneasy, like she's been abandoned in the middle of God knows where. He doesn't exactly leave her notes like her mom would -- she was a big note-leaver. John doesn't tie himself down like that.

Going to the bathroom and seeing John's crap on the counter makes her feel better, and she gets naked, shaves, and takes a shower while he's gone and can't get all pissy about how long she stays in the bathroom. 

Her habits have become pretty deplorable. She lives like a guy, except for her inconvenient period. She guesses John must've noticed her buying tampons and stuff at least once or twice, but he's never said anything about it, never seems to have given it any thought. Nothing's more fun than scaling a fence or squatting in a basement with a flashlight when you're bloated and bleeding, but it's all shoved to the very back of her mind. Sometimes it honestly startles her to make a quick run to the restroom and see a splotch of blood on her panties. Like, oh, right. Girls bleed. She downs painkillers and ignores it as best she can.

When she steps out of the bathroom, a towel around her, Jo hears John's truck, that massive stupid truck with its busted A/C that she kinda loves sitting up high in, rumbling outside.

She hopes he brought coffee.

"Where you been?" she asks as he lets a blast of horrible, hot July air into the air conditioned sanctuary of this crappy room.

"Out," says John. "Why don't you go put some clothes on?"

"What clothes?" she shoots back. "I hardly got any left. Maybe I'll just wear yours, huh?"

"Just get yourself covered," mutters John.

"Jeez, what's up? Are we having company? Wait. Are we letting the maid in?" She grins at the idea.

"No, we're not letting the maid in," he says, sounding amused and annoyed at the same time. "You just need to -- be decent."

"I'm the most decent person you know," ribs Jo, gaily dropping herself back onto her bed instead.

"Quit being cute," John says sternly. He's shucking his boots, and there, damp and naked under that towel, Jo flushes all over. Her skin changes on her, becomes this electric sheath, all lit up and hot, and her stomach tugs low.

"So I'm cute today, huh?" she asks, half joking and half really wanting to know.

John doesn't say anything for a long minute, and neither does Jo, and they're not looking at each other, and it's so awkward.

Why does she want him to tell her she's cute when she would fucking pop any other guy old enough to be her dad right in the kisser if they got all _hey there, honey, what's a cute girl like you doin' in a place like this_ with her.

"You need new clothes," John finally says.

"Jeez, you think?"

"I think."

 

*

 

New clothes still take a backseat, though. There's just no question about that. Everything takes a backseat to making sure they're not caught unprepared on a hunt. Silver bullets, stuff for spell work -- all that costs money. Sometimes info will cost them a hard-won fifty slipped to the right person. Gas is expensive, and they gotta eat, too.

It takes a couple of days of knocking on the doors of ex-employees to wind up with enough information to finish the unhappy spirit staining the office building and shutting down the power and flooding the bathrooms when it gets bored. At midnight, they break into the building for the third time, old hat at that kind of junk by now, and go around lighting candles and chanting (her Latin is total shit) and blessing every water source in the building. Sink after sink, cooler after cooler. When they finish blessing the last toilet, the brown stains ruining the walls fade away right in front of their eyes, the EMF's restless static dying along with them.

"Someone drowned in that building," John says, a moment after they're both back in the truck, like it's this protective bubble.

"In an office building?" There's not even a lake or river nearby. At this point, she hardly cares; they've finished another job, and she's just happy to tally it, happy to kick back in the seat.

"If you've got a better theory..." John kicks into reverse and they peel out of the office's parking lot unnecessarily fast.

But they don't celebrate. They just take right off for South Dakota, driving all night and all day. Jo sleeps in the front seat with John's jacket stuffed between her cheek and the door frame like a pillow.

 

*

 

"Hey, Bobby."

Bobby's grayed brows knit up in total surprise at the sight of them.

"Did you not tell him we were coming?" Jo hisses up at John. Great. She's gotten used to showing up unannounced at crime scenes and the suburban homes of witnesses, but this is Bobby, he's --

"I told him," John replies, all bite-your-tongue.

Oh.

"Good God. You two look like somethin' the cat dragged in," says Bobby dryly, and Jo grinds her teeth in embarrassment as she stands there on his somewhat dilapidated porch.

She's wearing one of John's v-necked white undershirts, which hangs huge and crooked on her, and those ragged cut-offs, and her hair is probably whipped and tangled to high hell. Her bags sag off her shoulder. She's red and sweaty, and John's not daisy-fresh either. But at least he seems kind of happy to see Bobby. They're friends, she guesses, even if John spends a lot of time drinking and arguing with him. Jo kind of likes Bobby, but he looks at her weird, like he's not sure of her.

She hasn't proven herself yet, she knows. None of John's contacts seem to want to trust her, let her into their circle, acknowledge her as one of their own. It's always a little novel that she's the daughter of Bill Harvelle to them, and they say, "Why, you got your daddy's hair," or whatever, but then she's rendered a little girl in pigtails they once saw a picture of sixteen years ago or the twelve-year-old doofus with too-big teeth who conned five dollars out of them and ran up an hour of the Bangles on the jukebox. They all act like she should leave the room when scary stuff comes up, like she didn't grow up hearing these things instead of bedtime stories. John doesn't expend energy defending her. She's sort of stopped expecting anyone to accept her -- but she wishes Bobby would. Showing up on his porch looking like this isn't exactly promising.

After a beat, Bobby moves back for them. His house is dark inside, and feels cool on Jo's legs by virtue of its shade. Bobby's big black dog is right there behind him, shuffling back too, claws clicking on the grimy wood floor.

"So what can I do for ya, John?" Bobby asks.

"A/C's busted," says John.

"Is that all," says Bobby, exasperated. "You didn't drive all the way up here for _that_?"

John just shakes his head. "It's got a custom weapons holder in the back -- I'm not taking it just anywhere. You got tools I can use, I'll do it myself. It could really use an oil change, too."

"Well, you know I got tools. Knock yourself out," Bobby says. Jo studies his face; it's hard to read in the shadows. He seems perplexed for some reason. "Guess you'll be needin' the couch for the night."

"I can sleep in the truck," says John, "but if your couch is free, might as well put it to use."

Bobby snorts at him.

"She can have it," John adds. He doesn't look at her or indicate Jo in any way, but he doesn't exactly have to, she guesses. It's not like he's talking about Rumsfeld.

"I'll sleep wherever," Jo says, tugging her slouching bag higher onto her shoulder. "I could sleep in the truck."

John turns a frown on her. "You'll sleep on the couch."

"Okay, whatever," she blusters impatiently. "It's not like I'm not used to the truck."

"You two beat all," Bobby laments. "No one's sleepin' in the truck. Come on, I got some leftover chili in the fridge."

 

*

 

The sun slinks off below the horizon as Jo sits at Bobby's slightly off-kilter table, downing a bowl of chili -- not bad, kinda heavy on the spice, but not at nuclear levels -- and it kind of reminds her of being home. Maybe that's just because she's been here more than once, which is kind of novel these days. Even though this is only the second time she's sat at this table, it still feels familiar and safe, and Bobby feels kind of like family, 'cause he knows her mom, knew her dad. Knows just about everybody. He's almost like a grumpy old grandpa or something.

Rumsfeld sits by Bobby's chair, though he gets bored of waiting for hand-outs and slouches into a nap. Bobby and John trade news, and she quietly follows it (Manny Rule moved up to Canada; some guy, something Wandell, succeeded in tracing the path of a werewolf that had migrated up the Mississippi and now everyone's keeping a sharp eye out for it; there are rumors of an exorcism a couple of states over but no one's real sure where these rumors are coming from; Caleb's gotten in another shipment of iron and is custom-making some blades), sitting with her and John and Bobby's legs all crowded under the little table. John sits with his legs wide open. That's a guy thing, except that Jo does it too now that her mom's not all _Joanna Beth, get those legs together_ , so their knees are trying to take up the same space. Hers is just grinding annoyingly under his, overruled but unwilling to admit it. She wonders if he even feels it.

"I gotta pay Caleb a visit," John says.

"By the sound of it, you gotta pay a lot of people visits," Bobby says pointedly.

"I'll do it sometime soon," John mutters.

"I hear all's quiet on the Palo Alto front," says Bobby. "You should do it before he graduates."

John just sticks a fork of chili in his mouth. Jo, headily aware that they're talking about one of John's sons, takes a glug of her water and pretends not to eye the two of them, like she could care less; Bobby, who could read the label off a box of Lucky Charms and make it sound significant, and John, staring at the salt shaker like he's keeping an eye on some distant dimension. She doesn't ask, because the minute she starts asking questions, John tells her it's none of her business. She just files the comment away with all the others.

She's slowly gathered bits of information about John's kids, aided slightly by Googling: one's at school, Stanford, real smart, and the other sounds like maybe he hunts, or is at least connected to the same network of contacts John has. She's seen a picture of them once, too, old and faded, stuck in the back of John's journal, but they were little kids then. She only knows one of their names -- Dean -- and she's not sure which one is which. She thinks maybe one of them's called a couple of times since she forced herself under John's wing, but she's not completely sure on that either. John's not exactly forthcoming about who calls him sometimes, and even less caring and sharing about his kids.

Sometimes it weirds her out that John's a dad. Mostly, she doesn't think about it. It's just weird when she remembers that he's got sons and never sees them. But then, she hasn't seen her own mother in about ten months, and that doesn't feel so weird.

"Well," says Bobby, with a note of finality, "you can get started on your truck first thing. You're gonna want to get a good night's sleep, though. The both of you look like you been livin' in a ditch."

"Just get a few beers in him," says Jo teasingly. "He'll pass out for twelve straight hours."

"Hell, I got more'n a few beers hanging around," Bobby says. "You want one?"

"Just one," says John stubbornly. "And you." He pokes his fork in Jo's general direction, then taps it on her empty bowl. "Fake ID's not gonna fly around here."

"Oh, Jesus," grunts Jo, pushing up out of her seat and giving John a light kick in the leg, just sort of a jab of her bare toes into the denim covering his calf. "How many times do I gotta remind you I was born in a bar? I was drinkin' beers out back when I was twelve."

"Heard from Ellen last week," says Bobby, making Jo briefly pause halfway to the sink, used bowl and glass in her hands. "Says you ain't been callin' her. You might wanna give her a call so she don't worry."

"What, is she gonna put out an A.P.B. on me if I don't?" Jo mutters, thinking of the police scanner her mom keeps behind the bar. Sometimes thinking about home makes her heartsick; sometimes it just annoys the crap out of her, and this is one of those times. She dumps her dishes in the sink and twists on the water, the pipes all groaning in response.

"I wouldn't wait to find out," says Bobby, all seriously, his arms crossed over his old guy pot belly.

"Yeah, well, every time I talk to her, it's just the same ol' story, over and over. 'Come back, go to school, you're gonna get yourself killed.' Sorry if I don't want to have the same shouting match a million times. I mean, I heard her the first hundred."

John, her hero, just sits there silently, like he isn't even hearing them. They stopped arguing about this issue pretty quick, since all it did -- kinda like talking to her mom and defending her presence to his contacts -- was waste time and energy.

Jaw set firm, Jo scrubs out her bowl till it's shiny and clean, then sets it in the rack next to the sink and does the same for her spoon, thinking about how she can feel Bobby's disapproving eyes on her back.

"I'm only sayin'," Bobby says. "If you're not gonna call her, send her a postcard or somethin' at least."

"A postcard," Jo repeats laughingly, and tugs open Bobby's ancient refrigerator. It's wide and heavy and maybe from the sixties, and there's a whole shelf of nothing but beer in it. She snags three by their necks with experienced fingers, all in one hand. They fan out from her fist.

Postcards. _Saw a vengeful spirit today, it was breathtaking. Wish you were here._ Not so much.

"Hey," John says. "What did I say about you not being legal?"

"Nothin' but the fact," says Jo, setting a beer down for each of them. She cracks hers open on the edge of the table before either of them can say anything about it.

She doesn't even like beer all that much, but seriously, what do they want her to drink, Kool-Aid? The glass bottle in her hand reminds her of the Coke John got her; how its cold sweat dripped down her neck, slid between her tits. She remembers how she held the bottle between her thighs, cooling them a little, but how persistently the heat between her legs pounded anyway.

She slides back into her seat, and under the table, her bare toes butt up against John's boot.

 

*

 

They drink through and past the ten o'clock news.

Bobby and John both get several beers into an exciting night of drunken story-swapping and arguing, but finally, Jo's brain is too tired and sloppy to keep up anymore, so she excuses herself to get ready for bed.

The worn-out couch in the living room is a roll-out that sticks and puts up a hell of a fight, but she manages to unfurl it on her own and surveys it dispassionately. Yeah, she's pretty sure she and John can both fit on it. She doesn't take up much room, after all. They've never shared a bed before, but they've both slept in the front seat of his truck at rest stops often enough and in the same room at motels. It's not like splitting the couch is a huge difference.

She climbs up the creaky stairs to the second floor, taking in the pretty stained glass window at the end of the hall, and peeks into a linen closet. It's nicely stocked, blankets and bed sheets and weird locked boxes that look like they contain treasure or something. She reaches in amongst the stuff and pulls some kind of pathetic bed sheets and extra pillows. They're thin and worn, but they smell clean and not too much like a shut-up attic or something, which is a nice surprise.

Bobby's bathroom, too, is surprisingly clean compared to the rest of the house. It's not that Bobby's a gross frat boy or anything, but it's pretty clear nobody's mopped up the floors for a while, and no woman would plaster the walls with photocopies and maps like Bobby does or stack books along the walls like they're barricading something. The bathroom's as old as the rest of his house, obviously, and there are a couple of tiles missing in the floor and such, but it's nicely lit and there's a worn blue flowery seat cover on the toilet's lid that speaks softly of a woman's touch. The window, though it's dim, is stained glass just like the ones upstairs.

In the medicine cabinet mirror, Jo sees what Bobby sees. The punched-out look of her eyes and their gray hollows don't go totally away anymore, no matter how rested she is. Her lips are chapped. She licks them slowly as she stares, turning the faded pink of them slightly wetter and brighter. Her hair is a godforsaken mess of split ends, tugged to pieces from the winds on the highway and from months of neglect. At first, she'd taken care of it, conditioned and brushed and styled it in the mornings as she stood barefoot in unfamiliar bathrooms, but she can't even remember the last time she did any of that. It all seems so fussy now.

She strips her shirt -- John's shirt -- off and sees the V of a sunburn on her chest. It matches the red of her cheeks, which doesn't seem to be going away.

Her eyes are like a stranger's.

"Yeah, that's real cute," Jo tells herself. Her own face glares at her derisively.

 

*

 

God, Jo realizes as she pulls the soft old sheet up over her body, she really fucking needs new clothes. It's getting ridiculous now.

She usually just kicks her shorts off and sleeps in her underwear and whatever shirt she wore that day, or whatever shirt she intends to wear the next. Until she goes pawing through her bag there in Bobby's dim den trying to find them, she doesn't even realize she's somehow lost the terrycloth shorts she used to wear to bed. They're just... not there. Maybe, she thinks, they ended up getting lumped with John's clothes at the laundromat and they're in his bag somewhere, but she knows better than to go looking. That's a big rule with John, and it's become a big rule with her, too. Their personal bags are off-limits, and they don't mess with each other's knives or get into each other's belongings. Doing so gives them the only sense of privacy and personal space either of them have these days.

But anyway, she can't find her sleep shorts, so she goes to bed that night with wet hair, in another shirt of John's -- some old gray henley he'd tossed at her as the number of shirts she had dwindled, too thick for summer but at least in one piece -- and her cut-offs. One of the bars supporting the thin pull-out mattress digs into her back as she settles down.

It's the least comfortable thing ever, and that's including the time she slipped and fell right into an open coffin, and landed on some dead old guy's corpse, cracking the ribcage and sending vile dust and dirt up her nose. Worse, John had laughed at her.

Fucking jerk.

She mushes herself down and closes her eyes, listening to the echo of their conversation in the kitchen -- something about New Orleans -- until she falls asleep.

 

*

 

When she wakes up, it's sudden, and the whole room is pitch-dark, and she gasps.

Her bed is shaking.

There's a rough, heavy, totally sloshed husk of a whisper. "Just me."

"John," she grits out, and lets her head fall back onto the pillow.

All at once, she remembers where they are, where she's sleeping. Her bed isn't shaking -- she just got jostled on the flimsy pull-out as John sat down. Her heart is throbbing against her eardrums, and her whole body is burning with the adrenaline of waking up in alarm.

Jo breathes heavy, heart flustered, but John doesn't apologize for scaring her. He's even more stoic when he's been drinking; she knows that now. Jo's been around drunk people so damn much in her life that it doesn't bother her whenever John comes back from a bar and passes out, or if he spends half an hour downing a bottle of Jack Daniels and watching infomercials with the same dead eyes she's seen in guys sitting over mugs of whatever at the Roadhouse, lost in their own sorrows and half-heartedly trying to drown them. She just rolls her eyes and keeps her trap shut. She's cheerfully unsympathetic when he's hung over -- even more so because a couple of times, she's gotten to drive the truck that John's so insanely possessive and anal about. Still, she feels distinctly unsettled, like his weight on the mattress is teetering her off-balance somehow. She's just not used to sharing a bed, she guesses.

She rolls over. Her body drags under the sheet, and it's then she realizes how goddamn hot it is, how uncomfortable her cut-offs are to try and sleep in, how thick this shirt feels. John's untying his boots. She knows the sound of his laces so well. They're thick cords. They whisk noisily against each other. There's a clunk as he gets a boot off.

Jo has no idea what time it is, but it must be the middle of the night. The yellow kitchen light is gone, dead. Moonlight is peeking in through the shutters; everything's gray, blue, black. She doesn't hear any other movements. Bobby's gotta be upstairs, in bed. She sighs and takes a deep breath of warm air that just makes her swelter; waves of heat are rolling off of John just a couple of feet away.

"'S hot," she murmurs, her complaint half smushed into her pillow as she squirms her legs, kicking the sheet off of her.

"Go to sleep," John tells her, like that's any kind of solution. He gets his other boot off after a second of pulling.

"Can't cool down," she replies fitfully, tossing her arms up to see if the huge sleeves of John's shirt will slide up to her shoulders. Her eyes are starting to adjust to the moonlight coming in through the slats of the boarded-up shutters.

"Don't squirm."

"I was fine till you came along."

John sighs, massive and impatient and sluggish, and she can feel and hear the roll-out mattress protest quietly under them as he fights out of his button-down shirt. Jo doesn't even know how he can layer up like he does.

Fuck this, she thinks dimly, just fuck it. She's been sleeping pantsless for weeks and he hasn't said a word about it, so fuck the rivets on her jeans digging into her hipbones and the seams all thick and sweat-damp along the insides of her thighs. She unbuttons her shorts and shoves them down beneath the sheets, pushing them off her ankle with one foot and off the side of the mattress.

The feel of air settling along her bare skin is wicked, the feel of the mattress against her through her cotton panties, over-warm with her own body's heat, weirdly intimate.

But that's nothing, she realizes, compared to when John heavily collapses at her side. All of a sudden she can smell his breath, beer-tangy and familiar due to riding in his passenger seat for months now, but never this close to her, not ever this close to her. She can smell his clothes, a familiar smell now like gas stations and laundromats and gun oil, smell his skin -- cheap soap and sweat on it -- and his hair, as lank and sweaty and blown as hers.

For a minute, she's paralyzed. 

His body heat touching her.

His bare arm next to hers.

His silhouette in the darkness, so close; proud nose, grim and defined mouth, untidy hair.

Slowly, selfishly, she turns herself onto her side, facing him completely, and even though she's careful and quiet, practically weightless compared to him, John still exhales distantly at her. "Don't wiggle all night, sweetheart..."

"I can't help it," she whispers, her face so flushed that her nerve endings all tingle painfully. "'S too hot to sleep."

John lets out another long breath into the darkness.

"Just keep still," he says shortly.

I can't, Jo thinks, I can't. You called me sweetheart.

She curls, slow and pathetic with want, her arms both clutching under the small swells of her tits that are all naked under his shirt, that are rising and rebelling and aching with her every breath. Her knees pull up until they brush his side, and her head dips onto his shoulder. He's wearing a wife beater but the bridge of her nose brushes the warm, bare skin of his arm, and she can smell him even better now. His deodorant, his jeans, the smell of the truck all over him.

 _Didn't I tell you to keep still_ , she expects him to say. _Didn't I say not to squirm._

But he just sighs at her, reaches over with a heavy hand and pushes her away.

No.

No, he doesn't. She waits to feel the shove, but it doesn't come.

Instead he tucks his fingers into her hair, finding bits that are still damp, his palm sort of sweaty and heavy against the heat of her face -- which just worsens exponentially, she's so sunburned and flushed and aroused. It's so sudden, Jo can hardly even process that he's really doing it, touching her hair, fingers threading through to her scalp and cupping the back of her head, the back of her neck.

He's never, not once, touched her like this. He's hauled her out the door before, grabbed shit out of her hands, pushed her back against a wall as a dark shadow passed them by. He helped tug her up from that open grave, huffing openly in amusement. He put an arm protectively, demandingly around her shoulders at a bar once, when the douche bag she'd been playing pool against refused to pay up. She's fake-cried into his chest.

But none of that was like this dream touch, this close fever touch she's burning in. She didn't even think he was capable of touching anyone like this. John, so immune to everything, so unamused by her, so distant -- pressing his chin down into her hair and cradling her neck.

 _No_ , she wants to protest when his hand moves away, but then she feels it on her shoulder, sliding loose-fingered and lethargic down her arm. It touches her ribcage, her waist, and John's just silent except for his breaths. They're loud as the wind.

He's drunk, she thinks, or half asleep, or something. He's going to be angry at her in the morning for touching him, for letting him touch her, for the way she slips a tentative arm around his middle and so totally invades his personal space.

But right then he just mutters, all beer-wet breath, "Sweetheart," like he wants that sweet heart of hers to break.

His hand brushes Jo's thigh, finding it bare, and she gasps. It's the hottest thing she's ever felt; his hand is huge, overtakes her thigh, wraps all around it. It seems like he's going to stop at any second, the pause he gives then just heavy enough to send her into overdrive.

Her heart thuds against his side, hard and alarmed, racing and unstoppable. She can feel her tits pressing up against him with their clothes between his skin and hers, can feel her lungs pushing her chest into him with her panting breaths, so hot and close to him but so futile.

"Listen -- you don't know what you're doing," John tells her then, all cracked breath, harsh.

"Yes, I do," she whispers intensely, shuddering with fear and excitement both. "You know I hate it when people say that. Don't treat me like I'm some little kid. You know I'm not."

This is always what it comes down to. _You don't get to decide. I decide. You follow orders or I'm putting you on the first bus back to Nebraska. You're not experienced enough. You're not doing that. Shut your mouth before I get mad._ Shut down. Overruled. Jo, eager to go, and John, keeping her at heel.

"Oh, fuck," she breathes then, wounded, because his hand's hauled her leg over his lap, splaying her open till she's practically straddling his knee.

Her panties are just ragged, thin cotton -- she can feel the denim of his jeans against her even through them, and the bone of his thigh is hard and unforgiving against her clit, sending a jolt up her belly and making her thighs quiver. She's practically burning through her panties with the heat of her pussy, and he must be able to feel it even through his pants. She might as well be naked.

John's hands catch at her hips, and even sloppy-drunk, he's so strong, so controlled. His fingers curl sternly into fists, dragging the waistband of her panties up till the crotch of them's cutting right up into her folds and making her gasp into his chest for this sharp second. Her panties, pressing near-painfully into her clit -- then he flips her over, pins her heavily.

This is happening. _This is really happening._

How long has she been waiting? Does she even want this? It's so real it's scary.

Desperate, she tries to push her hips up into his thigh for more friction, but he's so heavy she can't budge him at all, and then he's rucking her shirt up past her navel and sliding his sweaty hand right into her panties to cup at her, rub at the wisps of her curls and find how wet she is.

The first boy who ever touched her there was an Eagle Scout with an awesome knife collection. They used to shoot cans together out on his farm, lining them up on the fence and taking them down together one by one. He'd gripped her through her jeans while they kissed against the sun-bleached side of his barn and she'd gripped him back, all guts and glory. They'd been friends for a couple of years; they'd never actually dated, but they'd spent lots of time daring each other to do stupid shit. She remembers most vividly the pulling of her stomach in alarm and desire, like an electric shock the second he'd touched her. That was like this -- but this is better. This is worse. This isn't even happening. His hand is so huge on her, covering her heat with his own.

"John," she wheezes into his chest, but it's totally muffled, and it's only then that she remembers where they are, who's upstairs, and her eyes roll back into her head.

Bobby. Bobby can't know.

"Keep quiet," she hears him command, low and deadly, and she tries, oh God, she tries as his fingers open her up, sliding through her folds and pushing her own wetness around in these coaxing circles, the insides of his knuckles rubbing her off.

It's like time doesn't even exist and everything is just hot and crushing; her mind is black, her guts are twisting up, her thighs open around his hand. The smell of his sweat and skin, the scruff of his beard against her cheek for a split second rough and shocking, the slick sounds she's making as he fingers her there on Bobby's couch. He's silent, fucking stony silent, so she can only hear her own breaths ripping out of her and struggling against the ribbed fabric of his wife beater, which is all damp and warmed through where her mouth is pressed open.

She doesn't even remember the last time she got off -- probably months ago, alone in the dark in a motel, racing against his return -- so it's a crazed building in her guts that she can feel, like she's getting shoved there, jerked taut in his hand, ready to explode in an instant. She goes off like he pulls a trigger, the breath she pulls in pained and shaking, her muscles all clenching fiercely, repeatedly, against his fingertips as they rub her. Oh, God, he can feel her coming all over his hand, feel every pulse of it in her, feel the leak of heated juices against his fingertips. It smears beneath them till she's sickeningly wet, but he doesn't stop.

He still doesn't stop.

As if curious, he cocks his wrist, slides a finger up into Jo's cunt, and she contracts around him -- God, his finger's so wet, and weirdly huge, at least compared to her own, and she's squeezing him from the inside. Scarcely able to breathe, she suppresses a squeak, even though she wants to beg, _Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, John_ \--

She tries to hunch her hips, driving herself at his finger, her panties siding over his hand as she moves and he moves with her. Now she can feel him breathing, the rhythm and depth of his breaths pressing into her face, and she's just so needy, muscles all flexing to move herself against him, around him, on him, begging silently for it deeper, harder. His palm brushes her clit every time she moves and it drives her on recklessly -- then, suddenly, he's cleaving another finger into her, and she can feel his knuckles crammed up against her. He's stuffing her full of his middle and ring fingers, and tighter, oh, God, _more_.

It isn't until he jams her with them that she realizes she's making the fucking roll-out mattress creak like hell. Abruptly, Jo falls still, heat clamoring all around her like an oven as she does, and John takes over for her completely, rocking his fingers into her, fucking her with them in tight, slick thrusts, this thumb rubbing naturally with the motion right in her folds, right up against her clit.

She comes on him again and this time, he feels it inside her, feels her clamping around his fingers and wetting them in floods, and she hears him mutter, "That's right..."

Jo buries a strangled sob into his sternum.

She loses track of everything after that. God, it's never-ending; she somehow gets her arms up around him, gets an iron grip all around the massive weight of his chest, and she remembers him rubbing his fingers, all wet from her pussy, against the inside of her own thigh, dragging them and leaving her slimy. She feels him coming back to rub her through her panties, push them around over her skin, sliding them through and against her -- feels him thumbing them aside and pressing fingers into her again that way, the squish of her own come against his knuckles. She knows she comes again when he grasps at her hair with his other hand, pulls her face up out of his chest, and their breaths hit each other's faces, brash and hot. She doesn't groan and kiss him like she desperately wants to, just gasps, " _Oh_ ," from the idea of it and shakes apart, smelling the tang of beer on him and her own pussy smeared on his skin, and burns alive in his hands.


	2. Chapter 2

Like so many times before, Jo wakes up alone, but today the room is lit up, visible dust motes swirling in the sunlight breaking in through the shutters. It's warm, and the light is so bright it must be really late in the morning, or probably afternoon, but John is gone. And she's not wearing her shorts, but the sheet's been thrown up over her to her waist. It's like he was never there, or something; she can't smell him, doesn't see any of his clothes, his boots. Even so, she reeks of sex and sweat, just totally reeks.

Crap.

Not giving a fuck about modesty, Jo pushes up off the rickety roll-out mattress and goes directly to the window to peer out the blinds for the truck. It's gone, too.

Oh, fuck.

Even though her panties are stiff and she's still slightly damp in the crotch, she drags on her shorts and stumbles out of the den still fastening them up, listening and looking around desperately for any signs of life in the house.

"John?" she calls, her voice morning raw and sounding naked and frightened to her own ears. 

No answer. 

She pads into the kitchen. It's bright with sunlight -- and looks cleaner in such good light -- but empty. There's a back door that's open and is letting in breeze, which is dry and mild but which shifts the air past her knees pleasantly.

She steps out onto the rickety wooden back porch, barefoot. The wood is hot under her feet, worn smooth beneath footsteps through the years. It's so bright outside that the grass seems to glow and shimmer with the lazy wind. Sun glints off all the cars piled up in Bobby's back lot, catching naked metal where paint's been chipped or stripped off and shining brightly.

She shields her eyes and slowly ravages the whole place, like she'll suddenly spot John's monstrous black truck amongst the skeletal, half-crushed stacks of Oldsmobiles, her heart climbing up into her throat the entire time.

Of all the fucking days to wake up alone; of all places. This isn't some motel, this is the home of a guy who knows her mother well enough to call her and say, _Come pick up your daughter._ Jesus Christ, Bobby may be great, but she doesn't trust him as far as she could throw him. Her mom's probably on her way already, with a pistol and a pair of handcuffs.

"John!" she hollers, sharp and loud, her blood pulsing.

He wouldn't abandon her. He wouldn't just up and leave her here. He wouldn't. She's stuck by his side for months. Followed all his rules. Earned her keep by doing whatever he said, willingly giving up more than half of what she hustled for gas or ammo or lodgings. She'd opened up the possibility of two-man operations, so that meant John could take on more jobs, and get them done faster. She'd sacrificed so much to be here with him. She'd quit school just months before graduation. She'd pretty much ruined her relationship with her mother by leaving with him, and in the process, lost contact with the only connections she'd had. She'd been banged up, had too many close scrapes to ever sleep comfortable again, went _without_ because he didn't have time for Goodwill, even.

But she'd crossed the line, too. Whatever it was -- she doesn't even know -- it's all fucked up now. She'd ruined this, too.

Bobby.

"Bobby!" Jo yells, tromping back through the house. There's no creaking or footsteps coming from upstairs. He's gotta be here somewhere. Outside?

By the front door are her flip-flops. After wiggling her feet into them, she stumbles out the front door and down the steps, sunshine bleaching her vision for a hot second. There's rustling in the too-tall golden grass, and she turns to see Rumsfeld padding towards her, a heavy chain attached to his collar.

"Hey, pup," she says. He's hardly that; he comes up near as high as her hip. She pats him anyway, staring out at the empty country road that runs in front of Bobby's house, the shabby trees and fence that's obviously been forgotten about. Maybe it used to be a white picket fence. Bobby doesn't seem the type at all.

Jo wanders back, defeated, to sit on the saggy front step of the porch, Rumsfeld following and dropping himself at her feet for more petting. She sits there for half an hour, giving obliging ear-scratches and trying not to freak out, before a car appears on the horizon. It rumbles up, engine loud and gutsy, and swings under the Singer Auto Salvage gate.

Finally, there's someone. Bobby.

"Hey," calls Jo as he climbs out. Belatedly, she feels stripped down and weird, her insides giving a vague tug as she remembers, full-force, how John touched her. She'd been doing such a good job not thinking about it till now. Bobby -- hopefully -- has no idea, but she can smell the evidence all over herself and feels conspicuous, like it must somehow be obvious, what she did. How many times she came on his fingers stroking her and fucking her, and how she slept in her own sweat and juices.

"Hey yourself," Bobby calls back. He lugs a brown paper grocery bag up into his arm, his old cap tugged down low to shade his eyes. "Thought you were gonna be Sleepin' Beauty all day."

"What time is it?"

"'Bout a quarter after three."

Jo tries not to act shocked, but she is. She must've slept for twelve hours, probably a lot more. Her body never gets that kind of rest these days.

"Where's John?" she asks, then, somewhat afraid of the answer.

"Beats me," Bobby reports, scoffing. "He was workin' on the truck last I saw him. If I had to guess, he probably got it all fixed up and went into town. Nearest civilization's a good thirty-minute drive and it's nothin' but one street with a gas station and a church, but he's got a P.O. box there. Bet he went to check it." He hefts his grocery bag.

"Need help carrying?" asks Jo, relief turning her face pink as she stands.

"Nah, but I got a cooler in the trunk," replies Bobby. He eyes her and holds out a set of keys. "Think you can handle it?"

"Yeah," she says, stout. "I'm stronger than I look."

He drops the keys into her palm.

The cooler is seriously heavy, but she manages.

 

*

 

After helping Bobby put his groceries away (she's not too sure the help was needed, but it's not like her to be a bump on a log), he asks if she wants a sandwich, which is a big yes.

With practiced bachelor finesse, he piles up deli-sliced turkey and tomato slices, and she gets beers for them both. It's weird without John there as a buffer, or at least a big guy to stand behind. She wonders exactly how Bobby sees her. He probably thinks she's young and stumblesome as a newborn fawn. Everybody sees her like that, except John. Bobby sits at the little table with her and gives her stares over every pull of his beer.

As she finishes off her sandwich, Jo asks, "Hey, you don't got a washing machine, do you?"

"Sure do," Bobby says. "In the back."

Seeing as everything Bobby wears looks kind of oily, it's kind of a pleasant surprise.

"Mind if I use it? I'll give you quarters for soap and all."

"Don't worry about that," says Bobby, giving her a cocked brow. "I ain't a laundromat. Wash whatever you want."

Jo licks a drip of tomato juice off her knuckles and smacks her lips together around the sweetness. "Thanks. Not much to wash, but what there is needs it pretty bad."

Frankly, there isn't much else to do without orders from John. And as much as she can predict his reactions sometimes and how completely typical his habits have become to her, she can't read his mind. It's completely useless to try and figure out what he'd want her to be doing right then; she'd never get the answer right. And the leaden feeling in her stomach isn't so much Bobby's tomato-heavy sandwich as much as the fear that, despite what Bobby said, John's not ever gonna come back.

Standing in front of the washing machine in Bobby's humid back room, Jo stares glumly into her duffel bag. There's next to nothing in it now, other than stuff like her bent-up little address book, manila folders full of newspaper clippings and stuff she's printed out at libraries and copy shops. She's going to put them in her own journal sometime. Whenever she gets one. 

There's a zipper bag that holds her toothbrush and tampons and stuff. There's a lone pair of clean panties, but the elastic's starting to come detached from one leg hole. That's what she gets from buying them for a dollar at drugstores. She's only got the one bra left. There are two shirts of John's, the dirty white v-necked undershirt and a blue button-down that hangs off her like a tent. There's a couple of tank tops that she wears instead of bras sometimes. There's a button-down of hers, red and white, that's missing too many buttons to wear except with something underneath it, and a gross teddy bear t-shirt that isn't hers at all -- that must've somehow wound up with her stuff at some laundromat in some cruel karmic exchange for her other jeans. And she's in her only pants.

She dumps in everything but the teddy bear t-shirt and dollar panties that are falling apart, and quickly changes into them so she can put her cut-offs and bra in the wash, too. To make up for the lack of pants, she wraps a towel around her waist. Embarrassing, especially with Bobby right there, but hey, at least her modesty's kinda back.

 

*

 

The slowest two hours ever ticks by, and even though Jo practically trips over John's duffel bag as she strips the roll-out mattress of its sheets and folds the thing back up and it's proof he hasn't totally skipped out on her, every minute just jacks up her nerves. It seems like it's never taken John so damn long to do anything. Surely it doesn't take this long to check the mail, but then, John's always running on his own sweet time.

Jerk's got P.O. boxes in half a dozen states, she's realized by now. She knows there's one in Washington, and she's been to the one in Colorado with him on the way out from Oregon. Someone he knows in New York checks one for him. He probably keeps one somewhere near Jim Murphy's, too, because he's the only person she's heard of who John seems to actually trust.

Bobby disappears again, but eventually she spots him in his lot, pulling apart an engine, all its pieces laid out in a neat conglomeration on a wooden work table. Jo takes the opportunity to casually snoop around in his library.

He's got a ton of books on everything from werewolves and Celtic gods to pickling your own vegetables, gardening, and furniture restoration. He has a desk drawer full of nothing but maps, some of them all marked up, one of them of Beirut. He has file cabinet drawer full of cell phones, some obviously old and busted, some waiting in packages. The other two drawers are locked. And she's not even sure what a couple of similarly locked wooden boxes could possibly contain, but they don't look real inviting with those symbols scrawled on them.

She puts on her shorts and a tank top fresh from the dryer, the fabric still steamy-hot, and is in the process of clenching her jaw and packing up her duffel bag over and over, folding and re-folding her clothes, when she hears a familiar growl of an engine.

"Finally," escapes her lungs, and a quick trip to the window shows her the truck, sure enough -- the big ol' truck that's like home now. The door pops open, and the late afternoon sun glares off the door as John swings it open with its familiar creak. He slides out a minute later, bow-legged, annoyingly slow, distracted.

She's flying out the door without shoes on this time.

"Where've _you_ been?" she practically shouts at him, half relieved and half pissed.

He slips his keys into the pocket of his jeans, staring up at her on Bobby's porch like he's not sure who she is and why she's yelling at him.

After a minute, he says, "In Raleigh," leaving off the implied _you crazy person_.

"I thought you weren't --" It's out of her mouth before she can get a hold of herself. She stops, then finishes lamely, "Didn't know when you'd be back."

He just stares up at her. The sunlight makes his hair look like this furiously dark tangle -- makes his face seem darker, with its rasp of beard, instead of lighting it up. In there somewhere, there's a shadow of what they did on Bobby's couch, but even as she looks at him, it seems like it disappears inside him somewhere. It's gone, like it was never there in the first place.

"I'm back now," John says, in his shut-your-mouth way.

Yeah. He is. Jo tries to regulate her breathing, find something to say.

"Get the A/C fixed?"

"Yep," he says, standing there. She finally notices that he's holding something -- a white plastic bag, just hanging there in his fingers, bumping against his knee in the breeze. There's a pause, then he continues, as if she doesn't believe him, "A/C works. Oil's changed. Everything's taken care of."

"Good news," she says. There's this acid feeling in her heart, and she can't tell whether it's relief, or anger, or fear that things have gone and changed now; that he sees her differently today and she's reverted back into a little girl to him, a little useless girl who whines for attention.

"Can you be ready to go in ten minutes?" he asks, as short and demanding as always.

Jo lifts her chin. "I'm ready right now."

"Good. Get in the truck, I'm gonna tell Bobby we're headin' out."

She obeys instantly, fucking unsettled as she is, slipping her dusty feet back into her flip-flops and making sure all of her stuff's in her bags. John's bag is by hers, but that's his business; with her duffel in hand and her slouching messenger bag over her shoulder, Jo checks the bathroom for any stray crap, checks the back room, checks the kitchen. The remnants of her and Bobby's lunch are still sitting on the table, but she doesn't have the time to clean up. Instead, she hurriedly whips a pen and a scrap of paper -- the receipt for her three-dollar sunglasses that doesn't even bear the name of the moldy little place she got them -- out of her purse and writes him a note.

_Thanks for everything!_

She signs it with a heart and her name and slips it under her beer bottle, leaves it poking out where Bobby will be sure to see it.

Her mom would be proud.

Leaving Bobby's house for the final time and climbing up into the passenger side of the truck is exhilarating, like freedom and coming home at the same time, exciting and familiar. To her surprise, the truck's been cleaned out, vacuumed bare. The dash has been wiped down. Her collection of rings made out of paper straw wrappers is missing from the ash tray. The windshield's clean, and the whole thing smells vaguely of soap, like John took it through a car wash. Inside, it feels cooler than she remembers. John fixed up the air conditioning, all right, and blasted it all the way back to Bobby's. It feels amazing.

By the time John rounds the truck and climbs in alongside her, Jo's already poked through the glove compartment, kicked off her flip-flops again, buckled her seat belt, and self-consciously brushed her hair out, so instead of hanging in terrible tangles as usual, it's at least tamed a bit. John throws his duffel into the cramped back seat alongside hers.

Neither of them say anything.

John won't. Jo can't. 

Rumsfeld, napping beside the porch, lifts his head as John slips the key into the ignition and the engine lets out its mighty start-up roar, but he tucks it back down again as they tear out of the dusty drive.

 

*

 

John doesn't always listen to music -- mainly just on long stretches of highway, or at night when he doesn't want to fall asleep at the wheel. He doesn't always listen to stuff like Styx, either. He always turns "Come Sail Away" down. But the fuzzy classic rock station he's tuned into even though the signal's slightly out of reach puts it on and John just sits there through its dumbassery, and that's what makes it obvious to Jo. They're not going to even remotely talk about what happened.

That's good, she realizes, against her more feminine instincts -- the ones that pine for him to talk about the weather to her, even. That means John's not going to dump her at the next Greyhound station, right? And it means he's not sitting there holding it against her, if he's pretending it never happened.

Or, at least, it means he was too drunk to remember what he was doing.

She spends twenty minutes biting her lip over and over, not knowing whether she can live with that or not -- wondering what would happen the next time he's drunk and she's the nearest warm body.

And then, right when the road starts to go from dust to cement, and metal reflectors begin to flank them on each side rather than wooden posts missing the fence that once linked them together, John pulls off the road. The tires crunch over dry grass and rocks, and the world tilts along with the truck.

"Something wrong?" Jo demands, nerves splitting unpleasantly.

"Got you something," says John lowly. He reaches forward and turns down some Zeppelin song.

"Hope it's not a bus ticket," she manages, in the relative silence of the truck purring as it waits in park.

John just says, "It's not a bus ticket," and fishes fingers into his shirt pocket. Just seeing him do it makes Jo blush, because she's pretty sure those were the fingers he was sliding up inside her last night. It hardly seems real anymore, but her cunt remembers it, gets slick in a hot instant.

It's a phone. A cell phone, silver and smooth and new. He slaps it into her hand, then stares at his lap.

"Figured you should have one," he mutters, though he sounds like he could care less. "Better to have you in my phone than always having to write down the number of where we're staying, or always doing the ring-once system. Plus, it's got GPS tracking. Just in case."

In case of what, he doesn't say, but she gets it.

Jo flips the phone open, and its screen welcomes her colorfully. In her contacts, John's already put in a bunch of names. She sees Bobby, Caleb, Dean. She's never even spoken to Dean, and never will -- she's sure he has no idea she exists at all. It's such a real thread of connection to John's life, to who he really is, that she's sort of startled. 

And there, sitting atop Dean's name, there's a contact listed simply as _Daddy_.

Again, she gets it, gets why. They do the father/daughter ruse all the time, so it just makes sense for all kinds of reasons. They're so far apart in age and size that they can't pass for a couple without getting suspicious looks, like she's a dumb crackhead hooker or some high schooler he's kidnapped. Their fake IDs bear the same last name, too.

She licks her bitten, tender-feeling lips. She selects _Daddy_ and presses the call button. A few seconds later, John's phone rings. Instead of buzzing or blaring out a digital ring, it chimes out a tune that sounds suspiciously familiar. 

John just rubs his thumb against his steering wheel instead of moving to answer it.

"I have a _custom ring tone_?" she asks, the mere words making her grin, goofy, all too-big front teeth she got teased about when she was a kid.

"You like that song, right?" John returns doubtfully.

Of all the things to notice about her, she thinks, he's taken stock of her tendency to play "Manic Monday" on every juke box with a Bangles _Greatest Hits_ album. It had been on the juke in the Roadhouse for the longest time when she was little; she'd begged her mom not to change it out, but their regulars didn't tend to be the biggest Susanna Hoffs fans.

"I like it," she says flatly, and closes the phone again, ending the happy little tinkle.

If he was anyone else, this might actually be romantic.

"Checked out a couple towns while I was out," John pushes on, business-like, cranking into drive again. He doesn't ask her if she likes it; he doesn't tell her what to do with it. He doesn't say, _You should call your mother_. He just veers back onto the highway, foot on the throttle, and that is the end of that. Decision made.

"Find a job?"

"Found a Sears," he says.

 

*

 

Honest-to-God _Sears_.

It looks like an oasis or something, at this point, like it will disappear in front of her. It's not a very massive Sears, and even as she stares at it, an elderly guy in worn blue denim overalls comes ambling slowly out the door, shuffling toward an old pick-up with three different paint colors showing that wouldn't look out of place in Bobby's salvage yard. Someone's parked a tractor in the lot, too, and though the parking lot is cement, it's also caked with dust that looks golden in the late afternoon light and has weeds shooting out of zigzagging cracks.

"I've gotta get some stuff," says John. "So, uh, get whatever you need, and I'll find you in an hour."

"What if I need me some two-hundred-dollar boots, huh, sugar daddy?" teases Jo, sliding out of the front seat and onto the cement, a drop that always leaves her feeling like a cat that's just managed to land on its feet.

"Oh, you may be a sweetheart, but you're not big on sugar."

"So I'm 'sweetheart' again, huh? And I note you didn't say no to the boots."

She shuts her door; he hasn't even opened his yet.

Jo's not real big on sugar, that's true. Doesn't like things to be too sweet.

 

*

 

Shopping in a place that has more than a rack of Bob Seger cassette tapes, Route 66 ball caps, and hot dogs that had to have been rotating in a plastic heater for more than a year is totally freaking sweet, though. 

For once, John doesn't seem to take forever. He ambles up out of nowhere, looking tall, dark, and stranger-ish there in the women's section, which is near empty and which seems otherworldly, like some alien planet bathed in fluorescent light, she's so used to dank little motel rooms and the bleached grasses and too-bright summer sunlight. She's picked out a couple of button-down shirts left over from spring inventory; they've been marked down about three times.

"That's it?" he asks, unimpressed. He's got a couple of Sears bags and looks like the limits of his patience were severely tested just getting what _he_ needed.

"I'm a conscientious buyer," Jo responds, her own impatience flaring up. "Leave if you want. Go scare some kids in the toy department."

"Don't talk back," he says, gritted. "I'm trying to help you out. Two little shirts isn't going to cut it. It's hot now, but it'll be cold soon, and you don't have jeans or a jacket, or even close to enough underwear. Don't bother finding stuff on sale. I'll get you what you need."

The hangers squeak as Jo loses her grip on whatever shirt she was looking at. The whole row of shirts sways on the rack as John looks at her, all dark and intense.

"I can get my own clothes," she says, feeling borderline insulted.

"No, you're gonna be smart and save your money," John retorts. "I'm paying for this."

"No. _No._ I've got my own money. You don't need to buy me shit --"

"You don't need to waste time arguing with me."

"So, you suddenly all about buying me clothes -- and a freakin' phone -- 'cause I let you get your hand down my pants?" she spits lowly, that acid feeling flaring up again, and clenches her shirts to her chest, the plastic hangers digging into the tops of her arms.

It comes out so virulently, so childishly, that she's immediately embarrassed. Bringing it up here, in public, with these stupid lights on every few feet so there's no shadows or darkness to hide in -- not a smart move. She feels so fucking ugly and raw inside for caring, for dragging it out into the open between them when it was better off never spoken of and ultimately forgotten. And she's the one who wanted it, anyway. She's not stupid enough to delude herself otherwise.

But John doesn't blink at her. He just pins her with that straight, impenetrable, steady look of his, like he's trying to win some staring contest, and doesn't even move. Jo slumps like a petulant teenager, pursing her lips tightly.

 _Just take me to the damn bus station already_ , she wants to spit, staring down at John's boots. It's on the tip of her tongue, but she bites it back forcefully, imagining herself sitting alone on the floor of a dirty bus station in her raggedy clothing, her dad's knife in her fist. She'd want to cut everything in sight.

After a minute, John glances minutely toward the aisle, then digs out his wallet.

"Today was the first chance I've had to pick it up," he mutters, and thumbs one of the cards from it. It's a MasterCard with the name Alfred Post on it, and he holds it out to her, this new, unscratched plastic all warm from being encased in leather and tucked in his pocket. "Filled out the form two months ago, in Salem. Had Bobby get me a P.O. box near his place so I could have it sent there."

Credit card. They burned through their last one right after Salem; it had been rejected at a twenty-four hour diner, and luckily, between them they'd scrounged up enough out of their pockets to cover their bill. _Well, that's useless now_ , John had said, and tossed the MasterCard out the window as they pulled out onto the highway again. They've since survived just on hustling, as far as she can tell, and money went to food and ammo and motel rooms. John seems to be able to keep a small, steady flow of cash in his pocket, but she has no idea how he makes money outside of pool hall bets. He probably isn't earning it in any kind of legit fashion, so she doesn't ask, and of course, he never says.

"So -- we're good," John tells her, and she has no idea whether he's trying to be reassuring or it's in that shut-up way of his. "This is the time to get what you're gonna be needing for the next few months. You don't take care of it now, I won't be feelin' sorry for you when you're in a pair of Daisy Dukes in Michigan in the middle of December."

" _Daisy Dukes_?" Jesus Christ, her cut-offs go to her knees!

John scowls. "I'm not blind. I can see those things getting shorter."

"Like you care!" And before John can ream her a new one about sassing him back, she shoves the two shirts she's picked out at him, flattening them to his chest. "Fine! Just fine! Hope you're in the mood to use that freakin' card."

"Why d'you think I got it?" he grumbles, wrapping an awkward arm around her shirts. The material of them looks hilariously delicate and feminine as it folds down over his arm, and it makes Jo go from sour to laughing, just like that.

 

*

 

She really didn't want a buddy-buddy shopping day, 'cause it is fucked up, John tailing her from section to section like she's his mark, increasing amounts of clothes stuffed under his arm. He doesn't actually follow her to the racks -- he just hangs around in the aisle like a shadow, slanting resentful looks at everything.

The store's really not crowded, and their selection isn't what Jo would think of as broad or fashionable; she gets the idea that mostly, folks from the farms just outside this town come in to do their shopping here once a year, or something. But it doesn't matter. She isn't looking for trendy crap.

She knows by now that she needs stuff that's going to keep her warm in the middle of the night as she holds flashlights for John, mans the EMF meter, slides under tall cemetery gates, stands in the rain for an hour pretending to be a good friend of the girl who died in the crash and perfecting her fake crying, sits in a freezing, moldy old house all night waiting for signs of the afterlife, whatever. She grabs at long-sleeved thermal shirts and stuff she can layer over them, passing by anything that would catch on a fence and get a big ol' hole torn in it just like that. She thrusts a couple of hooded sweatshirts into John's arms, tears through rack after rack and looks at everything through the lens of her job.

This'd make her look fourteen; good for father/daughter crap. This'd make her look at least twenty-one; good for hustling. A couple of low-cut tops and a short skirt never hurt. Good for attracting and distracting guys.

She dips into the boys' section and finds a bunch of plaid flannel shirts in strong, masculine lumberjack colors -- red and brown and blue. Few of those. That way she won't need to be borrowing John's.

Boots. That's what she's really been wanting. Badass ones, so it'll really get John's attention when she kicks him under tables. Steel toes, baby.

Jeans. She gets four pairs. One pair rides so low her mother would grab her by the ear if she tried to leave the house in them, but they're perfect for bending sluttily over a pool table.

Jacket.

"Get two or three," John says, even though he's acting like he's not paying any attention. "You're gonna need 'em."

Okay. She gets a little denim jacket. A lined windbreaker.

"What about leather?" she asks John teasingly, holding one up to her chin. It's huge on her even though it's nowhere near the size of the massive one John wears.

"Get it," he returns.

"It's the size of Texas."

"So get a smaller one."

"You're paying," Jo reminds him pointedly.

"I'm paying," he says.

So she finds one that's more her speed, sort of deer-colored, that zips up and has stretchy cuffs so winds don't blow up her sleeves on chilly nights.

"So, uh, I'm gonna need underwear," she says as she slips it off again.

"Well, get a lot." John manages to somehow find room for the leather jacket even though he's loaded down with clothes already, including whatever it is he got himself. He winds up with it over his shoulder. "I don't want you running around all indecent anymore."

"What, like you never freeball?" she jokes.

"No, I don't freeball," he says, displaying his usual lack of humor. "And even if I did, you're a -- young lady --"

Jo cracks up. "A young lady, huh?"

"I'll go find a register, come find me when you're done," John grouses.

"Not so fast," Jo says, all hard-ass. "I have to try on some of this crap. Go wait by the dressing room in the juniors' section, there's probably a chair for sorry guys like you."

"I should've waited in the truck," John says, as Jo grabs him by the biceps and pushes him in the right direction.

"Yep," she agrees. "Now it's too late. You're my wingman."

 

*

 

Underwear -- who cares. Jo's always been a white cotton panties girl, anyway, and it's easy to find cheap packs of those in chain drug stores, but she still grabs several packages of Hanes Her Way. It'll be nice to have the elastic stay put for more than two weeks instead of ripping off easily.

She takes a few extra minutes with bras.

There's more to consider, even though her jugs aren't exactly bodacious. The ones she had before were from when she was in school and didn't run around or twist through small spaces or whatever. She didn't even care what kind she got. Actually, her mom usually bought them for her, 'cause she's never been much of a shopper or felt the need to impress some gross dude with lacy black underwear, and you'd have to forcibly drag her into a Victoria's Secret.

But John --

She feels weird for even considering it. Considering him. It's _her_ fucking underwear! It's not like he cared about her ragged underwear last night.

And it's not like, Jo thinks with a furious heat rising into her face, he'll ever touch her without going through a six-pack first, and then who cares what kind of underwear she's got on? She'll be kicking it off, squirming out of it, as fast as she can, before he comes to his senses.

After groping through for her size (small, really small) she snags a few plain white sports bras, and then another few in her usual style, which is plain, boring, the kind John's seen tumbling around in a dryer at laundromats a dozen times already.

Who cares.

 

*

 

She finds John collapsed in a chair by the dressing room in the juniors' section, exactly where she told him to be, looking too-casual, lap covered with the clothes she's picked out. She practically expected to find him napping while sitting up, which he's good at, but he's within sight of a register that's manned by a middle-aged woman, and he sits up straighter as Jo approaches.

"There you are, sweetheart," he says, sounding relieved, and his eyes dart nearly imperceptibly to the lady at the register.

"Sorry for taking so long," Jo says, scoping out the situation. "I had to find my size."

"Go ahead and try these on," John tells her pointedly, and cues her up. "Your mom's gonna want us home in time for dinner."

"Okay, Daddy," Jo chirps, putting a sweet, innocent, and cheery tilt to her voice. She comes right up to him and picks through the clothes on his lap, trying not to seem like this is anything unusual for her. "I'll do the jeans... and this shirt... and this one... be right back."

She heads into the dressing rooms, which echo the store's white noise in a hollow way, and catches sight of her somewhat worn appearance in the three-fold mirror in near the entrance as she passes it. Hopefully, she just looks like a carefree, summer-lazy farm girl instead of some flat-broke hustler about to charge a ton of money on the credit card of a guy that doesn't really exist. Thank God she brushed her hair today.

A woman's voice wanders down the hall to her ear.

"Was that her?"

"Yup, that's my little girl," John's voice responds. "Growin' up all the time."

"She's a real pretty little thing. All that blond hair."

"Yeah... she gets that from her mother. Looks just like her."

Smooth, John. Smooth.

"Well, isn't it nice of you to take her shopping," the woman continues. "I just can't get my husband out the door. 'Course, he's a type-two diabetic and gets dehydrated real easy, so it can be hard sometimes."

"Imagine that's so. It's just -- it's good to spend some time with my daughter, y'know? She's been away at cheer camp all summer."

Oh, dammit, she's got to be a cheerleader?

She slams the dressing room door behind her. Hopefully John hears it.

Out of habit, Jo scans the ceiling and glances into all the corners, trying to find a security camera or something. There's no need; they're actually paying for this stuff, so she shakes herself out of it and slips on a few of the shirts. They all fit more or less okay, so after a second's glance, she rips them off again, going through them in record time. Looking perfect and fashionable isn't the point. The boys' flannel shirts are all sort of ugly, but she feels safe in them the second she buttons them up, and they're thick and warm, layerable. The thin shirts left over from spring, airy and white with little pink floral buds and crap like that printed on them, seem kind of dumb to have picked out, in retrospect -- but they're perfect for when she's doing the innocent schoolgirl _cheerleader_ thing.

The jeans, all basically the same size in slightly different cuts and washes, fit just fine, and they feel so new on her skin that she actually can't wait to break them in, run around in them and send them through a laundromat like it's boot camp. The low-riding pair leaves a wide strip of her stupid drug store underwear visible at her waist. She rolls the pathetic white cotton down beneath the denim, and tries to check out her own ass. She can kind of see her spine, as usual, but she looks more muscular than she remembers, too. Her ass looks pretty good in these things, actually.

Yeah, her mom would really hate these jeans.

She grins at herself in the dressing room mirror and then opens the door with a click. She can hear John making forced small talk, probably a big tangle of lies, with the woman, still. She's probably bored to death and he's making her day.

"Hey, Daddy?" she says brightly, peering out at John. "Can you tell me if Mom would freak out about these jeans?"

"Come on out and give us a spin, hon," says the register lady.

A spin. Jo does -- she comes out, still wearing one of the happy little flower-print button-downs, and rotates slowly around for John and the lady. But mostly just John.

"Do you like 'em?" she asks, like these jeans are her biggest concern in the whole wide world.

"Well -- they're too tight," John says.

"They're not that tight."

"You can't wear those to school."

"But I can wear them at home, right? You don't mind, right?"

She gives John a sweet smile and cocks her brow.

"Your mother will mind," John says, a glare somewhere in there.

"Oh, excuse me, you two," pipes the woman at the register, who's rolling her eyes heavenward. The loudspeaker is blaring something about _Carol_ and _needed in housewares_. "Gotta go help the new girl, she's still picking things up. I'll be right back."

She totters off with a sigh, but Jo's too busy grinning at John to watch her go.

"They're too tight," John tells her seriously, in his real, unamused voice and not that doting father drawl he does sometimes.

"Uh, yeah," she says. "That's the point. They're the perfect dumb-blond-you-can-whoop-at-poker jeans. Come on. Just wait till I have to act like some drunk sorority girl. They'll do all the work for me."

She turns on her heel and heads back into the dressing room as John says, "I don't like 'em."

"Yeah, you do," she calls back cheerily, and pumps her fists. " _Daddy_. Rah, rah, sis-boom-bah."

Back in her dressing room stall, she peels the jeans down and gets back into her shorts, which suddenly feel loose and old, and like they'll tear like a paper towel if she's not careful, then fingers open the delicate little buttons on her pink shirt. She's saved the underwear for last, 'cause it's so _ugh_. Nothing like being reminded your chest didn't do a whole lot in the way of growing after sixth grade. Business-like, she tugs a bra on, just to verify its size.

"Are you gonna be done anytime soon?" John's voice booms down the hall, echoing in the claptrap space.

"Yeah, yeah," Jo calls back dismissively. "I'm done. Stuff fits. Let's get out of here."

There's footsteps, heavy ones, and then a tap at Jo's door as she fumbles her fingers behind her at the hook of the bra.

" _What_ ," she grits. In the mirror, she can see the reflection of John's boots just outside the dressing room door. "I'll be out in a sec! Just gotta get out of this stupid bra."

After a pause, John mutters, "Open the door."

"Gimmie a second," she repeats. Jeez, for someone who runs on their own special time, John's so fucking impatient.

"Hurry. I shouldn't be back here." 

Jo sighs, a mix of impatient and relieved when the bra's new, unused clasp finally unhooks and the band falls away from her back. She clutches an arm around her tits and cracks the door open with a mighty click that sounds about as loud as a gunshot in the small space, eyeballing John expectantly.

For a second, he just meets her eyes, then his hand is on the door and he's pushing it open, making her stumble back, the backs of her knees hitting the little bench where her piles of clothes are sitting.

"Jeez, what is it?" she demands in a low voice. With John in the space, there's not much left; it feels crammed full of him and too warm, too intimate. And her back is totally bare; even though she's facing him, it's bared to him in the mirror. It feels more naked than she thought it could. Jo bites down on her lip, and he closes the door behind him deliberately.

"Don't you get all cute on me like that -- with your tight jeans -- callin' me Daddy," he growls.

"I'm not bein' cute," she says, prickly.

"Oh, yes, you are."

John's hand grasps at her bare side, slides around to the small of her back, follows her spine; she shivers as his fingers slide over the place where her bra should be very firmly closed -- instead, it's hanging open at her sides, and she feels bare-ass naked. Gasps, because she doesn't think any guy's ever touched her bare skin there, such a stupid, random place but so suddenly sensitive.

"How'm I supposed to act like your father," he says, so harshly that it sounds like he's dressing her down right then and there, and when he grabs her suddenly by the hair, she feels a spike of fear and intensity.

Then he's kissing her, bending down and kissing her, his fist in her hair unclenching so he can grasp the base of her skull and press her up into it, his other hand pulling her in around the waist.

Fear bleeds instantly into a hot surge all through her, her own sharp intake of breath perfectly audible in the little stall.

Her lips, startlingly, don't feel crushed, even though she feels steamrolled by the suddenness of his mouth on hers. There isn't that warm, sour tang of beer between them, just the weird scratch of his beard and the way his mouth is every bit as demanding as it looks, without hurting her or scaring her. She bends under him without breaking, then pushes back against him hard, coming up onto her toes.

She can't help the way her mind reels wildly as his mouth catches hers, corrects her eagerness -- he's kissing her, actually kissing her, and it seems even weirder than him fingering her. When's the last time he kissed anyone? She's been on the road with him for months and she's never even seen him look at another woman, not as anything but a vulnerable widow, a source of information, a pawn to play for what he wants, or someone who's going to bring him a side of bacon with his southwestern omelette. He doesn't ever seem to notice if a woman is attractive, stacked, into him, whatever. And here he is, lips so strangely tender even though he's leading her, demanding her mouth move in response to his.

Jo can't breathe enough, can't kiss him enough, is scared that if she lets him pull back again he'll really never return, because they obviously shouldn't be doing this. Not here. Not on Bobby's couch. Not anywhere. She feels like a kid, a stupid kid, getting her first real kiss ever. There's thirty years etched into his face, influencing the touch of his hand on her waist, that she wasn't even alive to see. He's gripped other women like this; she's never even been touched on her naked back. A shudder of uncontrollable arousal rips down her spine and throbs between her legs, heating her cut-offs where they touch her.

"Oh, God, stop," she finds herself gasping, and he does immediately, pulling back like her mouth burned his.

His hand is still clenched in her hair, and for a second, her eyes are wide and vulnerable to his as they stare at each other. Too vulnerable -- it hurts. She drops her eyelids instantly.

Jo's arm grips tightly across her chest, just holding the bra to it even though the straps are falling off her shoulders and her chest is vibrating with her heartbeat, wanting, and she waits for him to either let her go or let loose with the stingers she knows are in him: _You're too young for this. You shouldn't have started this. I can't work with you anymore._

But he doesn't say anything, seeming dark and impenetrable, somewhere far away -- like he's not actually there, holding her.

"John..."

It comes out painfully, with the same kind of helpless, shamefaced wanting that made her curl up to him in the darkness, and she bites down on her lower lip, wet where he just kissed it. She can taste him on her mouth like second-hand smoke.

There's a beat of silence, and she keeps thinking he's going to let her go, stomp off -- something. Finally, she looks up at him again, and now, his dark eyes are actually looking at her; on the verge of devouring her.

Jo takes a deep breath, through which her heart struggles visibly against her chest, and drops the stupid scrap of a bra to the floor, and John clenches her tightly to him like she might fall down or run away, pressing them together from the hips up. 

Her tits are nothing to be impressed at; they crush against his ribs and disappear totally, her skin smothered by his body heat, and self-consciousness zings through her, leaves her electrified. John's huge against her, bigger in every way, but somehow it feels like she has more messy, desperate want stuffed into her body than he could possibly fit.

This time she's the one who kisses him, and she's nowhere near as docile, grabbing arms around his neck and pulling him down into it, her hair tickling her naked back as they sway dangerously.

Running on adrenaline that prickles her with heat and that low need in her gut, she opens her mouth, drawing his with it, and licks into him, breathing hard. She can taste coffee he probably downed hours ago, spit and heat and tender muscle, the roughness of taste buds and the weird, slick silkiness of the pit beneath his tongue. It's like she's in high school again, feeling things for the first time, but it's not just practice or fumbling, it's desperation -- like she's never going to get this again. It's never going to feel like this again.

"Huh," she gasps against him, her lips tender and open, when there's suddenly ice at her back, slick ice -- the mirror. He's shoved her up against the tall sliver of mirror in the little dressing room stall, and goosebumps break out across her skin from the unfriendly chill.

"Be quiet for me," John tells her, voice so deadly low she can practically feel it travel up her legs like a tremor from the ground. "I know you can do that."

I can't, Jo thinks vaguely, but she doesn't care, 'cause John's hand slides from her middle to grasp her between the legs, huge and strong and just like she remembers from last night.

Not here, not here --

He unsnaps her shorts with such force that the zipper rips as he pulls, and shit, he just ripped her last shred of clothing, but they're gaping open now, and his hand's sliding into them, trapped tightly between denim and panties. His hand's so big it barely fits down her shorts. Head clonking against the mirror as she drops it back hard, Jo aches against his hand and tries not to moan loud, her breath whimpering softly on its way out.

"Shh. Gonna make you come," he mutters, "then we can go."

All nonchalant, like they're hanging around at the library and he's hunched over a book.

Jo inhales sharply, teeth digging into her lip, and his fingers move in a casual circle, rubbing her panties over her clit in a way that's so knowing that she's sort of humiliated. She came for him so many times last night, of course he knows exactly where to touch her, exactly how. It's not even gonna take very long, she realizes -- a minute, maybe, she's so fucking pent up for him, has shoved everything down so hard that it's welling up and out like blood from a gushing wound.

"Don't stop," she finds herself whispering, her voice shaking in her chest, "don't stop --"

"C'mon, sweetheart," he growls.

_Sweetheart._

That's what does it, rolls her eyes back in her head and plucks her so hard she rattles, her hips hunching up at him and bending her spine away from the mirror. She can feel her breaths go pained and hiss out between her lips and teeth, echoing too loudly in the dressing room, feel her nipples hardening in an instant of sweet pain and her cunt pulsing against John's fingers.

"Good girl," he whispers, slipping his hand away all too soon. For an instant, she can smell herself on him, smell the heat between them, familiar.

"You ripped my pants," she gasps back, opening her eyes to focus on him dizzily. His jaw clenches, and he looks kind of weird, soft as if with sleep and intense like he's in one of his research stupors that'll drive him half insane.

"We're getting you new ones anyway," he says after a second, dropping his eyes away from her unspectacular bare chest.

"Well, jeez. Better get me a ton more underwear if I'm gonna be goin' through it like this," she manages.

After a beat, John says, "So get more."

They may be uninspiring, but Jo still scrambles to cover up her naked tits with one of her discarded shirts as he opens the door and ducks out of the dressing room.

Jesus Christ.


	3. Chapter 3

Two beds. _Two beds._

John shells out endless money, unfazed, buying all these clothes for her, puts her favorite song on his phone for her ring tone, calls her cute, calls her _sweetheart_ , touches her where Bobby or any number of women likely to scream could stumble across them --

But he checks them into a motel room with two beds.

It's so typical that she's annoyed, even though she knows it's realistic, and better if they're going to work the father-daughter angle to the motel people at some point. She smiles, sweet and boring as pie, at the guy behind the Formica-topped check-in desk. He's probably around John's age, gray visible in his comb-over, and she notes his wedding ring with the same force of habit that makes her note every security camera, every exit. John checks him over, too, and the whole room, silent and casual. She can hear John's voice in her head -- one of the first things he told her the first time he took her out for real.

_Before you go in, go around the entire building. Know every exit. Every exit. That includes windows. Second floor ones count -- you can drop off a low roof. Fire escapes count. Basements count. Emergency exits'll set off an alarm, so you better be fast if you use one._

This place has ducks on its ancient tan wallpaper, swimming and dipping their heads into water forever and ever as the pattern spans over the walls, feathers all done up in blue and what might have maybe once been white. Emergency exit in the back of the office. Two windows. A bathroom with a possible window. Not that she'll ever need to use it, but she files it all away in her short term memory. There are signs on the wall, framed as if they're art: YES! WE HAVE HBO; FREE COFFEE FOR TRUCK DRIVERS; CHECKOUT TIME 12 NOON.

"Do you guys have those Magic Finger thingies?" Jo asks, super-cutely, and John drops her a scowl. She grins back and beams at the guy behind the desk. "I just love Magic Fingers."

"Matter of fact, we do," the guy answers, returning her smile.

"Oh, great! Hear that, Daddy? They've got Magic Fingers."

"No housekeeping, please," John tells the guy flatly.

She's learned so well that John's not a talkative guy that silence lingers between them, something she's accustomed to even though it's just strange, now, heavy because of everything they've done and what, maybe, they might keep doing. Maybe John's got her really well-trained, because she doesn't ask all the questions she wants to ask, doesn't ask anything at all of him no matter what explanations he owes her.

The silence lingered in the truck after they piled it full of their purchases and took off to cross the nearest state line and find a motel, the radio doing all the talking for them.

It was quiet when they stopped for gas at a twenty-four-hour truck stop and got crappy dinner in the form of microwavable sandwiches from their refrigerators.

It hung over them when John pulled them into the parking lot of the Lake View Motel and they just sat there in the truck for a minute, bathed in blue neon stripes from the sign, like the fact that they'd be together in the room that night was hitting them both differently all of a sudden.

It lingers still as he hands her the key to their room and she slides out of the truck's front seat in her pathetic clothes -- the droopy too-big shirt of John's and her shorts with their newly broken zipper -- to go and unlock their room, bag slung over her shoulder as always.

He follows after a minute, bringing in all her shopping bags without saying a word about all of them, or about anything, and she follows suit, not saying anything as she takes them and piles them in her corner.

"I've gotta make a call," John says, leaning back against the door, eyes trained on the phone in his hand.

"Go for it, Mr. Talkative," Jo says archly.

John doesn't quite smile, but he digs into his jeans pocket with smirk at the corner of his mouth and then flips a quarter onto the nearest bed.

"Try out the Magic Fingers."

Jo's brows perk as John leaves the room, phone to his ear.

She collapses onto her back on the opposite bed, scabby knees hooked over the side of the mattress, and ignores the quarter, mind straying to wonder who John's talking to this late at night. Hunters do kind of tend to be nocturnal, but is it that important? More important than being alone with her in a motel room?

For long minutes, Jo listens to him just outside the door, catching low strains of his voice and all the various thunks and creaks of the truck's doors and trunk. He's probably digging around and packing his duffel bag full of canisters of salt and the weapons he can't function without having nearby, like some addict, leaving her to squirm -- just like he left her to squirm in the dressing room and left her to squirm at Bobby's house.

Or maybe she's more of an addict than he is.

 

*

 

Once again, Jo wakes up in the middle of the night, but it's not to find John sitting beside her. The lights are off, the curtains yanked shut against the harsh neon light that bleeds in a halo around them anyway, but she doesn't need light -- or even her eyes open -- to see what's going on. This is her life, now; whether John is in the room or not, whether he's asleep in the next bed or just laying there in a stone-still, restless pretense, is the language she knows now.

Two beds. That's how it is.

_Don't ask questions._

So she doesn't.

In the morning, Jo slips noiselessly from beneath the blanket.

John's actually asleep, which is a godsend, because now that she thinks about it, she hasn't actually witnessed him sleeping for several days now; he's probably caught a few hours here and there, but he's always up after her and up before her. His breaths are shallow, and somehow stressed like some invisible hand is squeezing his lungs just to keep him going. Now that it's morning, the highway noise has picked up a little bit, and Jo thinks she might be able to hear a TV or radio on a couple of rooms away. They're all comforting sounds. They keep it from being too quiet.

She quietly grabs her bag and some of the clothes she'd left in a pile the night before and shuts herself into the bathroom.

This stuff has hardly felt real until right then, bathed in the familiar yellow light of a crappy motel bathroom, taking up counter space along with paper-wrapped plastic soaps and glasses that never actually leave the room. The duck motif continues to dip and bob on the walls in here. The shower curtain is blue.

Wondering what their next job's going to be -- how John's gonna rustle it up, maybe he'll need her to help comb all the papers -- carries Jo through shaving, showering. As the water starts to fade from scalding (how she and John both like it, which means they both grouse about hot water a lot), Jo's hand drops to gingerly touch the sparse, sandy, dripping wisps of hair between her legs, a flash of disbelief going through her when she realizes all over again that John's touched her there. Felt that hair. Even in the heat of the shower, Jo can feel the chill of the dressing room mirror against her shoulder blades.

God, fuck, why did she ever let this happen? Will she think about John every single time she touches herself there? It doesn't seem like she could ever relegate it to the back of her brain like the boy she messed around with in high school. All those firsts, and she barely thinks of him now. Doesn't care about him at all. 

Maybe she can't even have a normal relationship with a guy, normal like most girls. Maybe she's just a guy at heart. The idea is more weirdly comforting than anything else. If she's on the same page as John, then maybe this won't just explode in her face.

Still, maybe she's a little bit of a girl, too. She bites through the plastic that attaches the price tags to all her new stuff and thrills as she slides each bit on. Nothing's falling off of her panties; they're snug, the material soft. The jeans don't feel like they're evaporating. The unfeminine sports bra makes her feel kind of pretty, even, just by virtue that it's snowy-white and new. And oh, yeah, she's going to work that pretty little daughter angle to death today: little white shirt with yellow and orange flowers printed on it, interconnected with tiny pale green stems and leaves. Jo blow-dries her hair with the cheap plastic dryer attached to the wall, and it's been a while since she's done that. Her hair is all bright, untamed waves, still in terrible need of a trim, but lit up gold from all the sun she's caught.

The difference in the mirror is amazing: she doesn't look totally beaten down, exhausted. She looks kind of normal. Like she used to.

She throws her old, ragged, busted shorts and panties into the little waste basket under the counter.

When she exits the bathroom, she finds John awake, sitting up against the headboard, forehead in his hand. It's still dark in the room. He looks incredibly broody.

"Morning," Jo says unapologetically. "I used up all the hot water."

A gusty sigh is what she gets back; it makes her grin and she doesn't even know why.

"You want some coffee? I bet I could go sweet-talk some out of the front desk," Jo says, bending to rifle through the plastic bags for wherever her new boots wound up. "Like, you technically drive a truck. They don't pony some up, that's false advertising."

The light turns on with a click; Jo glances over to find John in his standard undershirt. The blanket's still tugged up to his middle, but it looked like he was contemplating getting up at some point, 'cause he's got one leg off the bed, and it's bare, or at least, what she can see from the calf down. He's looking at her.

"New clothes?" he asks gruffly.

"Good eye," she teases back. "Just think, now you can have your shirts back."

"Turn around," John says.

"It's okay, these aren't the dumb blonde jeans."

"I know. Just -- lemme see you."

She stands up stock-still, feeling around on the back of her waistband. "Are there tags still?"

John stifles a laugh, his hand clasping momentarily over his mouth.

"No," he chuckles. "There's no tags."

Slowly, Jo straightens her shirt, staring over at him, not sure how to respond to that amusement in his dark features, that dimple she can see through the dark scruff of his beard. It's hard to tell if he's laughing at her or just what.

"I forgot," John murmurs, and then gives his forehead another deep rub, like he's massaging his brain. "What kind of stuff you used to wear. 'Till just now. I always tried not to look."

"You're still trying not to," Jo says, her voice catching over a worried laugh.

Wordlessly, John drops his hand, tucks it with his other arm in a bracing knot across his chest, and he nods. Without looking at her.

Four or five purposeful steps later, she's tossing her leg right over his lap and straddling him like she'd straddle a motorcycle.

"Jo," he says sharply. He hardly ever says her name, unless he's pissed, or he's delivering a hard, iron-clad order to her, but it doesn't stop her -- it just sends a spike through her guts, especially when he pins her with a hot, dark-eyed glare that looks like it rises from some kind of hellish depth in him.

"Stop trying," she chokes out, and leans in to kiss him, each hand coming to cup his jaw. 

In an instant, he grabs at her wrists, moving like he's going to break them both and knock her to her back, wrestle her away and shoot her full of silver.

"If we keep this up, you're going to get hurt," he spits out. "You don't know what you're doing --"

"Don't hand me that crap," she practically shouts. "You, of all people! You think I'm a virgin or something?"

He freezes, his fists so tight on her wrists that she can hardly move her hands, and her pulse is a hard knock in her veins, struggling to pound under his fingers.

Then, suddenly, he _is_ knocking her back, flattening her in an instant, and he's crouched over her, pinning her wrists to the bed so hard it almost hurts.

"How many boys have you slept with?" he demands, and that deadly cold voice shouldn't make her ache inside like it does.

"None of your business," she fires back.

John's head ducks, and this close to him, she can see the muscles in his jaw all flexing, hear him breathe hard and angry.

"This has to stop," he says, each slow, determined syllable ringing clear as day.

But it doesn't stop. He kisses her so hard it's like a knee to the gut, lets her wrists go and grabs her around the waist like she weighs nothing, hauls her up off her back again and crushes her up against his chest. Each of his hands span her shoulder blades, caressing them with borderline bruising force. It feels like his grip's going to tear the thin material of her shirt. His beard, a couple of weeks old, scratches her chin as his mouth opens hers and he slides his tongue in deep and dirty, his breaths leaving him in injured bursts.

Jo's hands, tingling sharply from how hard he gripped her, grasp at his hair, finding it unruly, thick and wavy and damp-feeling with heat and oil; her fingers squeeze at the scruff on the back of his neck. His lips pull at hers, and their tongues clash for a few sweet, strange seconds -- then he backs off, rolls the both of them over like they were on Bobby's couch, half pinning her with his weight. The mere muscle memory of it has Jo on edge.

"Get those jeans down for me, honey," he drawls, and his breath smells like the kiss. Smells like her, like her toothpaste. 

Body ripping into a tremble, Jo works the button on her fly open, squirms them down her hips. John's hand shoves them down past her knees, leaving them bare, leaving her thighs wide open, then brushes lightly across her panties, which are brand new but which are about to get totally ruined.

"How many times've you come for me already?" John asks, fingers sliding against her, caressing her through the layer of cotton like they did in the stall at Sears, but with all the room, all the time in the world.

She doesn't know -- "Lots," she gasps out.

"Last night. In the truck. I could smell your come all over my fingers. Drove me nuts."

John's fingers do that frustrating circle, the insides of his over-popped knuckles not near enough on her and yet driving her to dripping, she's getting so wet so fast.

"Do it like at Bobby's," Jo pleads, not liking the whimper in her throat but unable to get rid of it -- not with the way he's got her so jacked up.

"Like at Bobby's," John repeats, and for a split second she wonders if he was too drunk to be paying any attention to what he was doing, but then he capably slides his hand into her panties, making her gasp. His fingertips slide against her, into her folds, slickening as he opens her up. "Like that?"

"Fuck me with 'em," she gets out, squirming, hips canting. If she had any control over herself, ever, it's all crumbling now -- now that Bobby's not seconds away, now that they're not in public, and John's not telling her to be quiet or hold still.

"Jesus. Yeah, honey, I'll fuck you with 'em," he mutters in that deadly calm tone, and yet his fingers just slide, slippery and noisy, against her clit, and she sputters around her lungs pulling hard for air.

"Please -- _please_ \-- John -- _fuck_ me with 'em --"

She's never begged like that, like this is some porno, but then, nobody's ever strung her out like John, nobody's ever even gotten her off just sticking his fingers inside her. To her surprise, though, it gets her what she wants: John twists his wrist, slides his middle finger unerringly right up inside her, touches her deep.

"Oh, God," she whispers stupidly, because it feels so fucking good, so fucking good, and it's only just one finger. She hazards a half-blind glance between her legs and can see the material of her panties stretched all over the heel of his hand; they can't even contain it, and his thumb and pinky poke out, brushing the insides of her legs.

"That what you need, sweetheart? Need my fingers in there --" She can feel each knuckle as his finger slips back, can feel him press another finger to it and then slide them both into her pussy, filling her up like before -- like at Bobby's -- as he growls out, "Fuckin' you?"

Words come ripping their way out of her. "Don't stop -- don't stop --"

"Not gonna stop," John promises lowly, rocking his fingers into her steadily, not near as fast as she feels like she's gearing up. "Not gonna stop fuckin' you -- just like at Bobby's --"

Oh, God, yes; Jo's fingers claw the slick blue blanket as she wiggles and gasps, pushing herself up at John's fingers eagerly and shuddering on them as she comes, her insides jerking hotly around him like reflexes gone haywire and out of her control.

"There you go," John says, breath hot at her ear. "That's my good girl. I can feel how wet you are now."

Then his thumb is pushing at her clit, and she can practically feel his fingerprint in grooves and lines as it slides up, pushing invasively and making her gasp with raw, nervy intensity.

"John," she whimpers outright, grasping at his chest, fingers curling into the thin fabric of John's white undershirt for a second before she follows the obvious impulse and scrabbles her hand down to grab at his boxers, getting her hand around his cock before he seems to know what she's doing. The breath John hisses in through his teeth sounds like the gritted, pained kind he gives when doctoring his own wounds. She whines, before he can possibly pull away, "I get to touch you, too."

Her fingers are racing ahead of her brain, already fighting their way into his fly and touching at impossibly hot skin, feeling wiry hair and the bulge of what feels like fat veins as she gets her hand around his dick.

This is so not high school, Jo realizes, then, with a horrible tug in her gut that John can probably feel, what with his fingers still sitting readily in her. She draws up her fist, and the motion is familiar, but this feels so much bigger, so much harder than she seems to remember -- John is a grown man, not a skinny Eagle Scout midway through his junior year of high school. It's scary and so hot that she doesn't even know how to process it -- can't wait to _see_ it --

"You want that, huh, sweetheart," John says lowly, sounding dangerous, and Jo's heart jumps. Seriously? Oh, seriously? "You want me to fuck you with that."

Jo stares up at him with wide eyes, aching on his fingers, her own wetness starting to slip into the crack of her ass and smear on the insides of her thighs. She can feel teeth gently meeting to form the end the word, but she can hardly hear herself saying it.

"Yes."

In her fingers, John's cock moves -- it actually moves, twitching in response to her, and she squeezes it back, clumsy and wanting, grip sweaty.

"You a big girl, Jo? Think you can take that?" John's brow is dark, cocked expectantly.

"I'm a big girl," she hisses back instantly, excited, and it comes out without a single thought, she's teased him with it so many times, "Daddy."

It's probably sick, but it's like John doesn't even notice, except for the low noise in his throat and the pump of his fingers, slick, inside her as he starts moving them again.

"You wanna take Daddy's cock, huh?" he asks, and she shudders so hard that it feels like she's coming, her belly pulling hard and her pulse pounding against John's hand.

"God -- yes --" rattles out of her.

Instantly, it starts to snowball, and Jo's officially lost track of where they are, what state they're even in, because John's wet fingers are ripping her panties down her thighs, and she's trying hard to kick off her jeans, and John's right on top of her, pinning her bodily and shoving his boxers down, no-nonsense. She's only seen him in them once or twice, even -- it's so weird --

Jo's jeans and panties are still hanging around the knee of one leg by the time John's sliding his cock into her, slow and huge, sinking into her and opening her up around him.

"Oh, Jesus," she thinks she gets out in some form or another, and John's chest is right up against hers, pressing all the breath out of her. He's so much bigger than her it's like every part of her disappears under him; it's like his cock alone is the span of her unwomanly hips. It's almost violent, the way he rocks into her and the bedsprings just bounce her up onto him unforgivingly, busting her totally open and cramming her totally full. It feels so good she can hardly stand to be in her own skin, and when she wraps her bare leg up around John's hip, he grabs at it, holds it there encouragingly.

"'S right. Gonna open you up," John huffs at her, and for a second, Jo feels like he's going to fuck her spine right up into her skull or something, her skin all burns so bad; her bones all lock, her muscles all squeeze. He feels her, and his mouth is on hers as it commands, "You gonna come for me again, sweetheart? C'mon, come on my cock, get it all wet --"

"Oh my God," Jo gasps out, because it's the most fucked-up shit she's ever heard coming out of John's mouth and she can't help but respond to every order he gives her now, and everything feels so fucking _different_ , her cunt stretched open all around his dick, quivering and clutching tightly around it even though he's sliding into her, easy but hard, again and again. She hits it so hard her knee jerks up his ribcage, and for a moment, he bottoms out in her, lets her come all over him.

"Attagirl," John grits out, breath heaving in her face. "Like that?"

"Holy shit," is what makes it out of her mouth, dazed and hollow and gasping.

She can't even see straight for a few moments. He balances on his elbow, grabs at her hair with his other hand -- the hand smeared with her own juices -- and hauls them over before she knows what's going on. She winds up perched on him again, straddling his hips, struggling for balance as her weight hits her and she sinks down hard on his cock. It's like gravity goes wonky for a second and she's anchored between his dick and his hand holding her hair.

"Go on, baby girl," he growls, maddeningly, "show me you know what you're doing." 

And she could smack the shit out of him for calling her that, fucking hates it, fucking loves it; she tips forward, hands planting themselves above John's shoulders, her hair tumbling into his face as she kicks herself into frantic motion, working herself on his cock with her teeth gritted and tears of heat, effort, and some unidentifiable painful feeling in her chest blurring her vision. She's so wet she can hear herself riding him, sick little wet sopping noises, feel his cock up inside her moving smooth and slimy, but she can hardly see anything except the wild way her hair falls in his face only to be clenched up by his fist.

"That's it. C'mon. Show me how you can take it --"

"I can take it," she gets out, her own voice high-pitched, wild and uncontrolled and unrecognizable in her ears.

"You're takin' it," John readily agrees, low and approving, and Jo's spine curls threateningly, bending her forward until her head drops and her clit is grinding on John's pelvis, perfect and hard. "Gonna fuckin' come." He sounds dead calm about it except for the way he's gripping her hair, fists at her scalp. "Gonna come right inside you --"

She wants him to so bad. Wants him to be the first guy to come inside her, really inside her, with nothing in the way, nothing to keep it from touching her, flooding her. Nothing to keep her from him.

"Oh, Jesus, please," she hisses out, riding on the edge, and drowns John with her hair as he lets it go and grabs at her hips with hands that could grab her all the way around, meet on both sides if he wanted them to.

"Gonna fill you up," he grits out, and his fingers go tight, his arms rigid; he pulls her down on him tight and locks the two of them together, his lips curling into a snarl as he does it. She can feel it, surreal, the wet sputtering of it in her, the way her own juices drip down the spine of his dick and slip out over his balls to make room for his seed, the way her cunt holds his cock as it pumps deep in her. 

Jo bites down on her lower lip, shivering in her skin, her nipples going hard against the cotton layers of her bra and shirt, and John hums at her, "Yeah, you feel it, don't you."

Yeah, she can fucking feel it. She can feel everything. Feel herself, muscle and bone and goosefleshing skin, on him, around him, held by him. Full of him. She's never felt so full, so alive and blooming with heat from the inside out, so totally lost and dangerous. There's nothing around them to make John stop, now.

And he doesn't.

He's still clenching them together tight when he rolls her over again. His cock's still buried deep, and his weight on her presses it in tight and hard, crams her pathetically full and makes her moan sharply.

John just chuckles darkly and mutters at her, there, in the dim room. "You're not done, huh. You could come again."

In the cradle of his arms, her legs splayed wide around his hips and her pussy still full of him, Jo can't do anything but breathe in squeaks.

"I know you can," John says, and grinds his hips demandingly.

It's like he's not even done, nothing like the way she's used to being fallen off of, chortled at -- _Awesome. Man. What'd you think? I do okay this time?_ \-- and left with her senses shoved halfway up into something interesting and left to spiral down confusedly. Her body's opened wide around him, slickened up with his come and wanting and ready, and even though the only thing she can do is tip her head back and groan as he rubs her inside, that seems to be all she needs. When she comes, she clamps up tight around him, and they both lose breathless groans, panting.

"That's right," he grunts in her face, and Jo shudders endlessly. After a moment, John releases her, letting her shoulder blades slump against the mattress, and he murmurs, leaning back, "Gonna take a good look at you."

What exactly that means completely zooms over Jo's head until she feels him slipping out of her, deliberately slowly, both hands bracing the insides of her thighs. Automatically, she clenches down on nothing but her own insides, sopping with come, and John's thumbs swipe at her folds.

"Oh, God. Are you watching it come out?" Jo asks weakly, her belly tugging low. She has no idea whether the thought has her more panicked or turned on.

John just sighs, and it rumbles in his chest somehow, sounding like a growl. His cock's an even deeper shade of red than his face when he's pissed as hell, sunburned and overheated in the truck, and starkly wet and surrounded by dark hair that's unruly and thick. Even exhaustedly leaning and spent, it's so huge she almost can't reconcile the fact that it was just inside her.

His thumb is soft as it strokes her cunt and feels her still tremoring gently, feels the way she's still open from his cock. She bites her lip to cut off a gasp as he traces his way up to her clit and pushes at it interestedly. Down her own stomach, she can see a smudge of wet white on the edge of his thumb.

And before she can even realize what he's doing, John's bending in again, shocking her, his mouth sliding over her pussy and his tongue moving, full, hot, and alarmingly soft and wet, to take the place of his thumb on her clit.

Her hips are jumping away from him and her elbows planting to help drag her away before she can control herself. She's halfway to shrieking. "Wait -- what are you doing --"

But he grabs her, lightning fast, around the waist, before she can make it up the headboard.

"Don't tell me none of those high school boys ever did this to you, honey," drawls John from between her thighs, eyelids low, and for a second, Jo wants to reach down and slug his smug-ass face, because somehow, he knows _perfectly fucking well_ her not-even-boyfriend never kissed her any lower than her navel, and it's fucking humiliating. She isn't a virgin, but she might as well be, and it's fear, now. Fear. Not the hyper-awareness she shifts into as she holds the flashlight while John jimmies open a lock, not the adrenaline of some cop buying her story about knowing the victim hook, line, and sinker. Fear.

John's wide hands splay out over the insides of her thighs, looking dark and flushed on the milk-white of her skin, and he holds her legs insistently apart as he dips low and licks into her -- too warm, too much, beard rough on her sensitized skin. Her thighs jump against him, needing to snap shut.

It isn't anything familiar, like the rubbing of her own fingers, or even John's. It's so slick and warm and invasive, his tongue sliding over her and into her, that she wants to cry out, just cry out over and over in a way she never has before, feeling John's chin pressing into her and moving, wet and sticky, against her pussy. Instead, she catches her breath and clamps down on it and it whines in her own ears.

Within seconds, she's wriggling against him, hips canting so his tongue will slide right over her clit, and he rewards her with a sudden shove of two fingers right up into her, not near the size of his cock but so sweet. It's all so much -- too much -- her lower body locks, thighs shaking, and she's pushed up high, up and over, coming blind and crying, past scared into an open oblivion.

Jo can feel herself squeezing John's fingers, dripping his come, and John hulks over her for a moment, staring down at her sprawled, sweating, roiling ruin.

Her little flowered shirt is still politely buttoned.

 

*

 

Maybe it's the three and a half cups of coffee, but Jo can't stop fiddling with her cheap silverware, even though her body's just a jumble of fucked out, sex-soaked limbs and her eyes are scanning (and re-scanning) for keywords in the obits of the newspaper she bought from a machine in front of the diner. They're always the first thing you check. The butter knife she's twirling back and forth lazily isn't near as satisfying a weight as her dad's knife, but she's pretty sure she shouldn't be pulling that out of her brand-new boot right there in the middle of a diner.

On the one hand, it's kind of weird, sitting there in a booth as per usual when stuff's like it is. On the other, it's so routine that it feels like home, like she's sitting in her own kitchen instead of Potluck Patty's.

Every diner is a little different. The booths in this one are old, but comfortable, built before America started getting so dang fat that they had to start building the wider booths that put her far back from the table like some six-year-old. It's all peach and mint green, decorated with painted windows exclaiming over the "world-famous" pie, and the menu was printed out from a desktop printer and is decorated with clipart. A family of four's eating a few booths down from her, harried-looking young parents with two kids. Maybe they're on a road trip.

 _Need food?_ John had asked her when her stomach had twisted and grumbled, empty.

 _Genius_ , she'd said broadly.

 _Go put some pants on_ , he'd told her, the same old grumpy John.

 _Okay... since I actually have some pants to put on, now, and all_ , Jo had slung back teasingly.

He'd pulled into the first mom-and-pop place he found, which was advertised on the side of the highway by a sun-bleached billboard that looked twenty years old, asked her if she had her phone, and dropped her off with a meaningless, _Be back in a few minutes._ Heat shimmered off the sleek black truck as it scattered gravel on its way back onto the road. The A/C never even got the chance to do anything but blow mildly cool air.

Jo sits there in the diner for an hour by herself, pretending she's not bothered waiting for ages. After all, she should be used to it, right? Anyway, it's giving her a chance to think. And it's not like John's there to notice she's raked her eyes down the paper in laid out in front of her for an hour and still not folded over the page.

She feels different. 

Good. 

Strange. 

Sexed up in a way she's never felt, limbs all loose with satisfaction, insides vaguely aching and used -- but it's like she can't get enough. Just sitting there in the booth, she's horny. Wanting. The itch is unscratchable, crawling electrically over her skin and making her insides clutch longingly at nothing. And either she's wet, or she's still slowly leaking what John shot off in her, despite trying her best to clean up.

God.

Jo shuts her eyes, tries not to curl and wiggle with arousal, and thinks, _Stupid, stupid little girl._

Over the months, she's worn out and discarded all the things her mother told her like so many old clothes.

_You are not makin' a smart decision. You are gonna regret not goin' to prom. You are gonna regret not walking with your class. One day you're gonna wish you'd gone to college with the rest of your friends._

_There you go, chargin' right in, not thinkin' one damn bit about the consequences._

_Joanna Beth, you are gonna get yourself in trouble. That man is not gonna take care of you. He is gonna put you right in the middle of somethin' you can't handle._

God, it grates so fucking much that her mom always gets the upper hand with the I-told-you-sos, even when she's not right there to deliver them. Jo can hear them in her head and she hasn't even called her mom since April, the day she'd turned eighteen and tried to get in an I-told-you-so of her own. She _didn't_ regret ditching prom. She _didn't_ care about walking across a stage with a bunch of ignorant kids who only cared about marrying their boyfriends right out of high school or getting highlights or streaking through the halls or showing off their sweet new rims. She'd been out on a hunt. She'd hauled open a coffin, sweating rivers down her back and caked with dirt, poured gasoline on a mutilated, decomposing body, and lit that sucker up. She'd won three hundred dollars hustling frat boys. She had her ear to the ground -- and as disconnected as she was from what felt like everyone in the entire world, she felt connected to the earth, the trees, the night sky, the whole planet and its layers of life, in a way that no one but John could probably understand. She felt like her dad would be proud. Her mom had said, voice tinny and lost with the crack of cue balls somewhere in the background, _You're too much like your father._

But this... this is dumb. Like, George W. Bush fucking dumb. Not even thinking about condoms. Not even caring. Loving the feel of him, bare in her, feeling pumped full of him.

Jo is a stupid, stupid girl, because she just screwed a guy without protection -- she didn't even think about it once -- and she's never even done it without one. Isn't on the pill. Nothin'. Stupid, stupid fucking girl. 

The jingle bell tied to the diner door dances, but Jo doesn't really even hear it until it's just an echo in her head and she looks up to see John skulking toward her. His shoulders, as always, look heavy, but something about the loose way he's slouching makes Jo's body reverberate with a shameful heat.

"Careful with that," John says, and Jo whips the butter knife around, fists it, and puts it back down primly on her paper napkin.

"And where'd you disappear off to this time?" she returns, arching her brow as John folds himself into the seat across from her and flicks his gaze around the entire place. Wary. Alert. Studying. Casual. He has the whole place's number in about four seconds.

"Drug store."

"Did you buy me some feminine hygiene products?" Jo asks dryly. "Since you're so familiar with that area in general."

For a second, John just stares at her, then he puffs out a gravelly chuckle.

"Smartass."

"Yeah, well, I try," says Jo, and folds up her newspaper noisily, all business. John watches her do it, the whole time leveling her an unblinking, curious look, like he's never met her or they don't land on the end of the other's stingers every now and then. "... Coffee?" she asks pointedly.

John replies, slowly, "I want to talk to you."

It's hard not to feel a twinge of panic.

"'Bout what," she says steadily, and sets her mouth in an anxious pinch.

John leans forward and taps his fingertips slowly and noiselessly on the green plastic tabletop for what seems like a lifetime. Then he shifts her abandoned straw and touches the ring she habitually tied out of its paper wrapper.

"Look, Jo," he says, staring down at it. "None of this should've happened."

His gaze flicks up to her then, sharp, trained on her face, watching her bite down on her lower lip -- and then drops heavily again.

"I told your mother I'd take care of you," he continues, fiddling with her ring until the knot comes loose. Jo can practically see the hardness she's so used to coming back into his features, the sheer distance in his eyes. "She... wasn't happy when she found out you were with me."

"Yeah." Understatement.

"I tried my best..." John starts, and swipes his hand over his face uncomfortably, his ring glinting on his finger. "Not to ever look at you. You're like -- my daughter. You could be."

"But I'm not your daughter," Jo says flatly. "No matter how many times I call you 'Daddy.'"

That gets her a dark look, tired and empty eyes gone bottomless and hot. 

"You know that gets to me," he says, and Jo flushes all over. No distance now. It's the exact opposite; they're almost too close for comfort. "Don't distract me."

"Yes, sir," Jo replies, but it's indulgently rather than obediently, a smidge too cute.

John's eyes are relentless as they stare her down for a long moment, and not even the domino-effect din of a clatter of dropped plates or pans or trays in the kitchen and the exclaiming of the people back there makes either of them blink.

Then, John digs into his pocket, throws a distracted glance over his shoulder, and on the table between them, lays out a small rectangular package, silvery foil with plastic encasing two small white pills.

"You're young. But you're not a little girl," he says pointedly. "Take one now. Take the other in twelve hours."

"Oh, thank God," Jo blurts, and it's only half because of the pills.

 

*

 

Four-thirty the next morning sees the alarm clock waking the both of them up and dragging Jo's ass out of her bed so she can haul it into the bathroom and gulp down her second morning-after pill. Neither of them said much about it after the first pill was downed right there in the diner, even though Jo's relief is probably actually making her glow in the dark, and John shoves himself up in his bed and flicks the bedside lamp on for her, lighting up the way to the bathroom and all the bobbing ducks on the dingy tan wallpaper.

The other half of his bed's covered with the collected local and state newspapers he fell asleep scouring, but by the time she comes wandering back out in her panties and tank top, he's stacked them all and is grumpily dumping them off the side of the bed.

"No luck?" Jo asks, hitching a thumb into the back of her panties and ungainly picking her wedgie.

"Mm." It sounds like a negatory grunt. "Get it taken?"

"Flushed it," she says, just because she obviously took the damn thing.

"I oughta spank you," John returns, so seriously that it catches her off guard for a second.

"Yeah, bet you'd like that," she flings back, dropping herself onto her mattress with a bounce, all bare-legged, and bare-chested under the soft, brand-new tank. John watches her for a hot second, then jerks his chin down robotically, a fall of dark hair threatening to get in his eyes.

Jo turns the light off again.

 

*

 

Maybe John's secretly a morning person and you'd just never know it 'cause he's always up all night driving or staking out houses for signs of a haunting. It seems like he's always up before Jo, and she's always distantly noted how he's most efficient when he's packing his bags in the morning, like he has it down to a routine and actually enjoys said routine, the brisk lacing of his boots and the ticking through of his belongings. The way he packs all his stuff up in the same order all the time, neat as a pin and sort of OCD in his own offbeat way.

But this morning, he's not packing his bags. He's not even making coffee, or out getting any. The first conscious thought Jo has is just a bright mental picture of the silvery morning light hitting John's face and brightening the old, forgotten slashes sitting on his cheekbone and corner of his eye, catching the glints of gray in his dark beard. He's sitting there on the end of her bed in his boxers and tired, no-longer-white shirt. It looks like the one she's been wearing for most of the past month. Maybe it is. It sagged off her shoulders, but it's drawn snug over his, fits him exactly.

Her sleepy eyes take him in for what feels like hours before she's aware of blinking and losing the sight for a split second.

John doesn't say anything, even though it looks like he has something on his mind and a thousand things on his shoulders, but he doesn't look away, either.

She probably looks like a wreck, the ponytail she'd secured last night loose and half spilled out, tank half pulled up her stomach under the blanket. But John's stare doesn't say anything about it. He just looks at her, and Jo knows he's thinking about her, and it's so electric that the pale hairs on her arms want to stand up straight.

Finally, John looks down at his own hands, twines his fingers together and flexes them in a knot and slides them so he can fiddle with his ring.

"How many boys've you been with, Jo," he asks, then, gritty, and doesn't look at her.

"One," Jo gets out through a morning-fresh throat, and wonders for a moment if it makes a difference, if she's really so virginal or if that means she's disappointed him in some way, before she realizes John's frozen solid, mid-twist of his ring, his eyes shut. Casually, she adds, "'Sides you," and razes her teeth over her lower lip. "I was a junior --"

She stops, then, 'cause that just makes her sound like such a kid -- talking about her junior year of high school -- and sits up, suddenly needing to. She winds up leaning back against the headboard just like John does. John's head ducks, like she's just done something provocative, and he nudges his forehead with the knuckles of his thumbs.

"What? Don't go getting girly on me," she half-laughs, not knowing what to think. "Does it bother you, or something?"

"It doesn't bother me," John mutters into his wrists. "Other things bother me."

It's so weird. John's talking to her like he might actually say more than _get up, get dressed. Get your feet off the dash._

"Like what?" she presses tentatively.

John's hands clasp and become a cradle for his forehead. His voice is dead calm, like he's steeling everything in him, like everything in there's either rigid in effort to keep him alive or is just already dead and brittle and about to collapse. "That this happened. I need you to be -- safe."

"I am safe," Jo says, automatically defensive, even though she has no idea what John even means by that. Safe? She's still live and kicking, isn't she? She's got all her limbs, and they all work. She does the job exactly like he says, does everything he tells her to do -- or was screwing her without protection just that unsafe?

He talks right into his hands, threatening curt, he speaks so sharply. "And I need you to know that the last thing I'd _ever_ do is hurt you."

"Yeah," she finds herself responding, bewildered, "'cause if you did, my mom would kill you."

After a moment, John just murmurs, as if conceding a point, "That, too."

It's only then that it occurs to Jo that maybe John didn't actually ever get to sleep last night.

"Well, thanks for the concern, Daddy," she starts, the word slipping sarcastically from her before she can stop it, before she can think at all, or even feel the physical pull of arousal through her veins and guts just forming the word with her teeth, just thinking it. The physical rush is huge, dizzy, nothing at all like when she'd teasingly bat her eyelashes at him and act up the part of his upset daughter.

"You shouldn't call me that anymore," John says.

The heat in her belly goes ugly in an instant, feels like a sucker punch.

"Fine, then. Don't call me 'sweetheart' anymore," she snaps hotly, and throws her blanket off her as she climbs out of bed and rounds him, feeling naked and like she might throw up, now that she's up and moving.

"Fine," she hears him intone, dull.

Once she's safe in the bathroom, Jo manages to get in a good door-slam, the kind her mother would _don't you dare slam the door at me_ her for and that she fully expects John to yell at her for. But he doesn't, and she stares at the beige toilet, feeling like she wants to dry-heave over it but biting it back, swallowing it all pridefully. 

It's not like it's a shocker or anything that John's gone by the time Jo's gotten into the crappy little shower to angrily scrub everything off her and stepped out again. Wrapped in one of the threadbare, inadequate motel towels, Jo goes to peer out the window, and sure enough, John's truck is gone, a couple of fresh-looking spots of oil left behind on the pavement glistening in what promises to be another boiling hot day. She feels the summer heat in the glass of the window as she rests forehead against it and fantasizes about smashing the glass, about how fucking satisfying that would feel.

For the first time, Jo wonders if she should give up, go home -- ask John to take her, or hitch a ride to Bobby's and have her mom come pick her up. Go simple, go easy, go Greyhound.

All options are fucking humiliating, but not as humiliating as sleeping with John Winchester, who doesn't want her now that he's had her, and who probably didn't ever really want her under his boot in the first place. 

 

*

 

It's when Jo gets pissed that she gets determined and an unholy fire lights itself under her stupid ass. She stomps out of their room at the Lake View Motel with her slouching messenger bag slung over her shoulder, and it feels just like when she stomped out the front door of the Roadhouse and yelled over her shoulder at her mother, _You can't stop me!_

Except this time, there's no one there to yell at.

I'm out of here, she thinks, on loop, a broken record of defiance and determination. I'm gone.

The only things she takes with her other than the clothes on her back and the sunglasses on her nose are her flashlight, her EMF meter -- even though John's is about three times better, her beat-up manila folder full of various Xerox copies of case information and other assorted files, her knives, and her phone. John may have bought it for her, and she may be a stupid little girl, but no way is Jo tromping off into the wild without it. She's got about a hundred dollars, some of it stuffed in her pocket, some of it in her broken wallet, and some of it tucked into the lining in her bag, pathetically hidden -- just in case.

Even striding through the flat, endless middle of nowhere, Jo finds bits of glass to crunch forcibly under her boots, broken bottles thrown out of car windows or left there by dopes who think it's smart to drink on a bridge. She steps on every bit she sees just to feel it grinding against the pavement underneath her, the knowledge that she's reducing it to dust oddly satisfying.

She crosses said bridge, under which dribbles a pathetic brown stream, and eventually passes the diner from yesterday, its gravel parking lot comfortably crowded with cars. It's about lunchtime, the sun high and straight overhead and leaving her with the tiniest shadow, like she doesn't even exist.

It's promising; the highway is just about empty, but the cars probably mean there's civilization not far off, and it's not near as hot as she thought it'd be. It's bright and warm, but pleasantly so, and breezy.

Half an hour or so later, she hits town, though she's wandered past several farms and houses before realizing that they're grouped into a lazy, widely-sprawled collection that could be considered a town. Half of the farms looked abandoned, rusted-over equipment left out in the earth and elements for who knows how long. All the houses seem low and wide, like they're all laying down across the flat, wide plains instead of standing up. A rusty water tower and a Lutheran church with a bell tower and its own little old cemetery sit on the same lot; both are white-washed but look sort of lazy, like they too might start leaning back.

Downtown is one street, with uniform red brick buildings side-by-side, some of them plastered, though the plaster looks like it's been sloughing off like dead skin for years. There's a few dirty cars parked in front of a post office, a barber shop with one of those actual red, white, and blue barber poles. It doesn't even look like the kind of place that would have indoor plumbing, let alone electricity and cars.

Jo spots a tiny library and heads for it hopefully, wondering if the internet is too much to hope for.

"Why, hello," a red-haired woman says, as soon as Jo tugs open the glass door. The woman's pushing old, but not quite there yet, has thick glasses with a glinting chain attached to them, and is looking through them at Jo with some surprise, standing with a cart of books she's re-shelving in the one-room building.

Jo offers her a big smile, even though she mainly feels like stomping and crushing some more chunks of glass beneath her heel.

"Hi. Can you tell me if I can use the internet here?"

It's one of the ways she's learned to subtly phrase questions, always appealing personally to whoever she's speaking to, and the librarian smiles, all thick coral-pink matte, at her.

"Why, yes, you can. But I'm afraid our one computer that's hooked up to the internet is occupied at the moment. You'll have to wait for Earl to finish with his turn. "

She nods toward a scuzzy-looking guy with grizzled jowls and a ball cap, not to mention red suspenders over a blue and green plaid shirt, who glances at her resentfully.

"Earl, you got a little over ten minutes left."

"Yeah, yeah," Earl grumbles.

"That's cool," Jo says. "I'll just look around till then."

"Can I help you find anything?" the librarian asks her solicitously.

Jo almost says no, but follows a kick of determined gut instinct and says, instead, tilting her head and doffing her shades in order to look more sincere, "I hope so, ma'am. See, I'm real interested in local history. You know... buildings and houses, families, people who've lived and died here... stuff like that."

The woman adjusts her glasses, peers at Jo for a weird second -- like she doesn't quite believe Jo's serious -- then says, "Well, then, I bet you Earl can tell you everything you want to know."

Earl shifts to look over at her again, dubious.

"Really? You know all about this place, huh?" Jo asks him, pitching her voice in a pretty good imitation of awe. She's learned not to undervalue direct sources, but Earl also looks like the kind of guy who brushes his teeth with a toothbrush he crafted himself out of a popsicle stick and a bit of some squirrel's tail. Or maybe like the type of guy who lives in a house filled with every issue of _TV Guide_ printed up since the beginning of time, which is weird, but possibly helpful.

"Just about," Earl grunts, and squints at the monitor.

"Give him his ten minutes," the librarian murmurs at Jo, smiling again. "He's emailing his granddaughter."

"Of course," Jo says, though it makes her feel a pang of distant disconnect. She has no one to email. Her mom doesn't even have a cell phone, and right then, she doesn't even know what she'd say to her mother. _Dear Mom, I'd rather sleep under a bridge than come crawling home in defeat, but I've fucked everything up with the one person who gave me half a chance. See you soon!_

Jo trudges to the table in the center of the room and pulls out an orange plastic chair so she can slump into it. She, Earl, and the librarian are the only people there, and it's quiet, the hum of the air conditioning and drag of the chair's feet loud over the old linoleum floor. It feels good to rest for a minute, but uncomfortable to have nowhere else to go and nothing to go on, and to sit and realize how seriously she's thinking about just going home. How she's never apart from John unless he's given her a mission or left her to take care of his own mission, and how she feels lost, just a few miles from the Lake View Motel.

After a couple of minutes, Earl says, out of nowhere, "Her name's Savannah."

"That's such a pretty name," Jo responds, and it comes out wistfully.

"She's ten years old this month," says Earl, still staring at the screen. "She ain't got no daddy in her life, so I email with her twice a week, tell her Grandpa says hi and tell her I love her."

Jo's dad died when she was ten. She'd been ten for a month.

"... It's really nice of you to let her know you're there." 

Earl types slowly and watches his fingers pick out the letters, glancing back and forth between the screen and keyboard between each word. But it's not much longer before he sits back and reaches for the mouse, gives it a click, then scoots out from the computer slowly to look at Jo.

"Whatchu wanna know, darlin'?"

Figuring it can't hurt to just lay it flat-out for once, Jo asks, "You don't happen to have any haunted houses or anything like that around here, do you?"


	4. Chapter 4

The thing is, Jo thinks she can handle this by herself -- the whole salt and burn thing -- but John's got the shovels. 

And the salt. And the kerosene. And a truck.

And a first aid kit.

By the time she makes it back to the Lake View Motel, she's crossed town twice and her lip, busted open on her own two huge front teeth, is pounding with pain, swollen and tender, and her entire arm has a dry, itchy dribble of blood running down it -- not to mention her shirt. She's simultaneously cussing out the thing that shoved her down a flight of stairs (fucking mama's boy) and praying John's still gonna be there. 

As she'd limped out of town again, she'd been sure John would have come back to the motel, would've seen all of her bags of unworn clothes still hanging around and realized she'd just left to go blow off some steam -- but as she got past the diner, her heart started to race with a painful adrenaline. What if he'd just up and left, just like she'd had half a mind to do?

John's truck isn't in the parking lot.

That doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't mean he's gone.

She gets past the front office, thinks for a hot second about going in to ask if her father's checked them out already, but she knows she looks like she's been beat up and that the owner would probably call the cops.

When she winds around the office and spots their room, its curtains closed but a light on inside, visible even though it's not quite twilight, she practically falls over in front of the door with relief.

Sitting awkwardly on the tiny cement step right in front of the door, Jo fishes her phone out of her purse and turns it on. She hasn't even used it since John gave it to her, and she knows him well enough by now to know he doesn't even know how to send a text message. It's a wonder he figured out how to set a custom ring tone on his. Maybe someone at the store did it for him. She's seen him go through cell phones twice already, and it's only been five months.

She has four missed calls from _Daddy_ , and it makes her stomach turn, makes her hot and chills her at the same time, somehow. She shivers in the placid heat.

John picks up on the second ring -- it's weird to realize his phone's playing "Manic Monday" at him, wherever he is -- and barks, "Where are you?"

"Kissing Valentino by a crystal blue Italian stream," Jo answers.

There's a pause.

"Where are you, Jo."

It sounds low, static-ruined, pissed and annoyed and...

"Worried?"

"Worried -- of course I'm worried. I got back and you were gone. Didn't leave a note. Didn't take anything, not even your clothes, just your bag. You weren't picking up your phone --"

"It's been off. I just turned it on."

"Leave it on from now on," John demands. "Why do you think I got you the damn thing?"

"Uhh," she gets out, but can't come up with anything before John interrupts her again.

"Now where are you. I'm coming to get you."

"I'm at the motel," Jo says, and her voice quavers with relief and vulnerability without her permission. "I'm sitting outside the room."

"Don't move. I'll be right there."

"Hey, I found us a job," she says loudly, before he can hang up on her.

"... You what?"

"I found us a job. Just on the other side of town, there's this old house. It's kind of set off the main road, back further into the fields behind a farm, and it's blocked off, got a 'No Trespassing' sign and all that crap. It's got a bulldozer sitting out in front of it. Apparently they're gonna tear it down or renovate it into a bed and breakfast or convert it into apartments or something --"

"Let me guess. Someone doesn't like their digs getting messed with."

"That, and apparently the kids around here fifty or so years ago used to call it 'the body factory,'" Jo says dryly, licking her sore lip. She's been tasting blood and sweat for the last hour straight. "Talked to this old guy at the library. Not counting the husband, who died in the Civil War and whose body never made it back home, the deaths there started in 1886, with the whole family who built the place dying of consumption. It's had a run of bad luck ever since, on and off. Even the locals noticed. Ten deaths in all, including the last owner, who -- guess what -- started coughing up blood. They thought it was some kind of mold problem, or something, and the guy at the library told me they'd even had a team of scientists in to test for it, but they never found anything. All that and it's this local legend, the spirit of the widow crying at night and lights in the windows when no one lives there... all that kind of crap. But, best I can figure, it's got _two_ spirits, the widow and one of her kids. A son."

"You had me at 'No Trespassing,'" John says, and Jo huffs into the phone, staring across the parking lot and into the nothingness surrounding her -- the dead summer grass, the steady march of poles and power lines bordering each side of the highway all the way back to town, the way the sky's going pink in one corner. After a moment, John says, simply, "There in ten," and hangs up on her.

Jo keeps her phone in hand as she clutches her elbows around her knees and stares out at the highway. Even though it pulls at her mouth, pulling the tender split in her lower lip, and she hurts all over, in every way possible, she can't help smiling.

 

*

 

"You're bleeding," are the first words out of John's mouth, and they're punctuated by the loud slam of his door.

"Nah," says Jo, brushing grit and dust uselessly off the ass of her new jeans as John stalks over, staring at her with those unfathomable eyes. "I was earlier, but it stopped."

"What in the hell happened?" He grabs at her bare elbow and rattles the key into the doorknob of their room. "Let's get you inside."

It's hard to tell whether the hand that's firm on her arm is angry or concerned or controlling or just what, but it doesn't scare her; Jo lets herself be herded inside the cool motel room, then grasped at on either side of her face as John kicks the door shut behind them. She barely has a moment to register how torn-up the room looks, like John for some reason was looking for her under the beds and between every sheet and behind every Sears bag full of clothes. Jeez, she's not _that_ short.

"It's not a big deal. I just bit my lip," she says, rolling her eyes so she won't have to look John square in the face for more than a second at a time.

John's thumbs brush softly over her sweaty-warm cheeks, making more heat rush through her to touch against his skin.

"Douche shoved me down the stairs!" she announces, shutting her eyes against the onslaught. "First thing it did! First floor was clean. No EMF, no weird sounds, nothin', so I went upstairs, and the second I got up there, it started goin' off. I didn't even have time to open one of the doors before something pushed me right back down the stairs again. I caught myself halfway down, but I jammed my chin on one of the steps, and..."

The explosion of pain is still vivid in her mind, as is the angry-looking young man she'd glimpsed on the landing, staring down at her with hate-filled eyes for a terrifying second before disappearing like she'd only just imagined him there, some figment of her own pain.

"You went to the house by yourself?" John asks, and she can't read his tone at all. He always sounds so irritated.

"Yeah, sure," she says defiantly. "I was already in town. I had my meter. I had my knife."

There's a beat of silence. Jo opens her eyes and looks up at him, steely. But John's got his eyes closed, too, even though he's holding her face steadily, still.

"We got bodies to work with?" he asks.

"Check. I got the name of the family -- Shappley -- but there were three sons. Not sure which one is hangin' around bein' a suck-up even in the afterlife, but the other two died young, so hopefully there's headstones with dates. And there's two cemeteries here. Both are attached to churches, but only one of the churches is still in use. The one on the other end of town's abandoned, and my source told me that all the town founders are buried there. I'm gonna have to go with that one."

His eyes open, black lashes flicking suddenly and eyes fixing down on her face. "You put together a job based on what one random person tells you?"

"Not just him. Librarian, too. And I got copies of everything the library had on them. There're a few pictures of the Shappleys. Lots of articles on the house. The whole file's in my bag."

She gives him a stupid grin, probably looking ridiculous with her bloody lip. She licks at it self-consciously.

"Good girl," John says, and briefly sweeps his hands back to grasp at the base of her skull, fingers momentarily holding her by the hair before letting her go totally. "Let's get you cleaned up."

"John," she blurts, missing the warm steady firmness of his hands immediately and feeling stupid, so stupid, but -- "Sorry I didn't have my phone on."

After a second, John jerks his chin toward the bathroom and mutters, "It's okay. C'mon."

After a minute, he follows her into the bathroom, his makeshift first aid kit in hand. It's just a beat-up metal tackle box, familiar at this point, full of gauze and bandages of all shapes and sizes and tape to seal them down with, packages of sterile disposable gloves, styptics, bottles of saline, hydrogen peroxide, tissues and cotton balls and several different kinds of painkillers and other packages of stuff she doesn't really recognize.

"Sit down," he orders, and Jo shoves the toilet seat down and slumps down onto it tiredly, watches John wet down a washcloth in the sink and then pour a bit of hydrogen peroxide onto one corner. She reaches out to take it, but just gets her chin taken in one callused hand and her mouth dabbed at.

Stuff stings, but she doesn't flinch or hiss. When it's satisfactorily clean, John dabs the threat of alcohol away from the inside of her mouth, and she's flooded with a tattered old used-up memory -- brightened momentarily by the trigger -- of her dad pasting a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles band-aid over a scratch on her cheek, which she'd gotten trying to climb a tree.

"You want some ice on that?"

"Nah," she gets out softly. "Maybe later."

"Take some painkillers. Swelling'll go down."

"''S swollen?"

"Looked in the mirror lately?"

Jo's so used to not looking in the mirror anymore that she didn't even bother, and leans over curiously. The red split directly down the middle of her lower lip is obvious, and it looks like she's pouting, her lower lip's so fat. She can see the smudges of dried blood all down her neck and the massive spill down her shirt from the moment of impact. She remembers the warm trickle of blood down her arm as she'd covered her mouth with her hand, and the way it had dried on the trek back to the motel, but hadn't paid much attention to the fact that she was ruining her new shirt.

"Glad I didn't stop for pie or something," she says as John shakes pills into his palm from one of the plastic bottles.

She's done this for him before, fetched him painkillers and brought him cold compresses, but he's never done it for her. Never had to, she guesses; she's always doctored her own hurts. And it's not like she can't clean up on her own right then. The fact that she isn't, even after stomping off with the idea of ditching him and being determined to check out the possible haunt on her own, makes her belly throb lowly with an unrecognizable strain of desire.

It actually hurts to try and drink, but she swallows two Ibuprofen and a whole glass of tinny-tasting cold water anyway, and John lets the sink fill up with it.

"Take your shirt off," he says.

Jo's fingers obey him automatically, grasping at her hem.

"What, are you gonna stand there and watch?" she asks, then just brazenly whips it up her arms, twisting out of it right in front of him. He tugs it off her and plunges it into the cold water, all business.

"Nothin' I haven't seen," he informs the sink.

Jo crosses her arms over her tits, feeling stripped and exposed even though she's wandered around in a towel and he's pretty much seen her totally naked, if in bits and pieces, at this point. Her arm's bloody. And so is her bra, she sees, glancing down at it.

"Aw, great. Fucking great --" The momentary press of her teeth against her lip just to cuss hurts. Jo twists her arms behind her back and unsnaps the hook of her bra, completely irritated. She's just gotten all these new things and is already going through them like Kleenex or something, and yeah, she gets it. Her boobs aren't much to look at. She shoves her bra at John. "Here. Dump this in, too."

John takes it from her, eyes averted.

"I'm gonna change," she says stoutly, shoving herself up and sliding by him, still in dusty jeans and boots that are still breaking in. "We've got graves to dig up."

Like her shadow, John steps after her and lurks there behind her, leaning against the duck wallpaper by the doorway and shoving fists into his pocket.

"Can't go until after dark."

She kneels, awkward and sore from her tumble, and rummages around in the blue bags, but nothing's where she seems to remember, like John kicked around all the bags while she was gone. "Quit watching me," she tells him loudly, rifling through plastic.

John inhales, deep and slow, then lets out the breath in a sigh behind her that goes right up her spine and tightens her bare nipples hard against the cool air.

"I can't."

She's whipping her head around and looking at him before she can get a grip on herself, her hair tickling her back, her bloody arm forgetting her bare chest entirely.

The way he's looking at her right then turns every muscle in her on, every nerve ending alive, trapped there under the grip of her jeans or bared totally to his eyes.

"Just sitting there like that," he says, "you could be wearing anything and I'd still --" He shakes his head, then, like he's internally punishing himself, and mutters. "Don't even know what you're doin' to me."

"What. What am I doin'?" Jo chokes out, grasping an arm over her tits and shoving herself up with the other, wanting to stand taller, wanting to grab the first dirty shirt she sees and tug it on protectively. "Y'know something? After all this time, I still can't figure out whether you even like me or not."

For a moment, John stares at her, then he tilts his head and drawls out, slow and dark, "Oh, I like you, sweetheart."

... Oh.

Jo fumbles and finds the soft cotton edge of a purple shirt, yanking it out of its plastic bag and going right for the tag with her teeth. It snaps off roughly, and she probably looks feral or something, biting through shit while her mouth is torn.

"You put that on right now," John drawls, "I'm just gonna take it right off you again."

"So take it off me again," Jo says, challenging. Borderline disrespectful, even. Hoping he will. Hoping he won't.

The slinky, new, soft cotton falls over her bare chest, and she's just pulled it straight when John's hands grab at her from behind, grasp over her hipbones and graze her stomach as he does it -- pulls the shirt up and off her torso again, making her arms lift and twist through the sleeves and her shoulder blades shiver as her back is bared to him, hair all caught up in the shirt for a split second before it tickles her suddenly oversensitive skin.

The shirt's dropped to the floor again.

His fingers bracket her ribcage; his palms cover her tits completely; it feels so good to be in his hands that it hurts and she aches with the pain, hisses and arches at the way his fingers close in a rough pinch on each of her nipples, treating her with more deliberate know-how than anyone else ever has.

"I thought you said this can't happen," she gets out between gasps.

"It's already happened. It's been happening. For months."

Standing there, dusty and sore and bleeding, breaths stinging her busted lip, Jo finally burns to the bone, to ash. She's never been the girl she turns into right then, no matter how she's been pouring herself all over John. He grabs her by the belt loops and hauls her to her knees on the mattress in front of him, kicking her up a few inches and letting his hands slide low, one holding her around the belly and the other clutching her right through her jeans, dirty and deliberate. Her knees slide apart on the mattress pleadingly and her hips work themselves against his hand, and if her mom knew how far she's come from being the girl who used to punch boys in the nose, how fucking sexy and reckless she feels, she'd be locked up in her room back at the Roadhouse for ten to fifteen.

But John isn't treating her like a little girl; knows she isn't. Knows better than anyone.

She arches, leaning back into his chest, and he rewards her, stroking her cunt hard and tight through her jeans and panties, pressing the seam of the denim into her clit, and she could come this way, if he'd let her, just keep touching her like that --

But he takes his hand away, and she cries out in protest, hips riding nothing. "John..."

"I got you," he says, as blunt and silencing as ever, and both his hands work the button of her fly open. Jo's the one who shoves her jeans down as far as she can, till they're tight around her spread-open thighs; John just catches her chin again, this time pulling her face back so he can kiss her, fat lip and all, his taste sinking into her cut and his tongue following it softly and catching on her dumbass front teeth. Fingers -- both his and hers -- compulsively move to clutch between her legs, and his wind up over hers, pressing her own into her clit through her panties. He knows, he knows. Exactly how to touch her. How she should touch herself: unafraid and wanting and repeatedly. She never even knew how to touch herself, or her own body, like John knows it. It goes from feeling filthy-hot to ruck against him, half-naked, to vulnerable. Touched. Known. Taken care of. It's the sweetest little orgasm she's ever had, coaxed to it by her own fingers under his, caught against his mouth and bleeding on it, from that tang of iron.

She's still choking on it, still trembling on her knees, when he twists her capably and gently onto her back and ducks to tug off her boot.

It's weird, John undressing her like this, one boot and then the other, then peeling her jeans down her legs, a smile somewhere on his mouth even though he's working quick, like he's just barely got a rein on his own patience.

And she's never been so naked as she is when the thin cotton panties slip past her knees and off from each foot and she's completely bare, not a thing left to take off or hide behind -- and there he is, fully dressed.

"Don't laugh," she blurts out of nowhere, body shuddering along the mattress with how fucking naked she is.

But that just makes John chuckle at her, threadbare and dark-eyed, as he goes for his belt, the buckle clinking as he strips it open.

"No one's laughin'."

Her own chest, pale except for the flush of her skin and the pink rectangles cut from the sun she'd caught earlier, pumps up into her line of vision as she watches him undress, thinking crazy thoughts. Her chest's too small; she's embarrassed, not a woman even if she's not a little kid anymore. He's watching her watch him, can see everything from the sandy glint of hair between her legs to the blood welling on her lip and being licked away by her own tongue, sucked into her own mouth. He was married; still wears his ring. She doesn't care. He has kids, kids older than her, boys. She doesn't care. She's the girl he's looking at, the girl he held down as he came in her, the girl who's been sitting at his side for months as the both of them have thought of this and tried not to.

Jo can't fucking wait for him to be in her again, screw her and hold her and fill her with come. And she doesn't fucking care how stupid that makes her.

He knees onto the bed as soon as his boots are off and lets her attack the slobby old t-shirt he's got on, lets her get his chest as bare as hers, dark hair electrifying her fingers, the tattoo on his bicep more of him she doesn't know about but touches greedily.

But as soon as her fingers clumsily and insistently work open his jeans, he pants down at her, "I don't have to fuck you. You don't have t --"

"I want you to," she breathes fiercely, and instead of arguing, John just ducks his chin in a nod. "You want it, right? You wanna fuck me again."

"Yeah, I do," he growls back. "Can't stop thinkin' about it."

"Then do it. C'mon. If you can't... I mean, I'm not -- it's stupid. You can pull out, right?" Jo says wildly, face burning in the pitiless lamp light.

"Oh, no, honey. That's not happening," John responds, all know-it-all, and Jo's guts twist in disappointment for a harsh second before she realizes John's digging into his back pocket. After a moment, he tosses a piece of bright plastic onto the mattress next to her, and Jo knows that shape pretty damn well from the only other time she's fucked around with a guy.

"Fuckin' Boy Scout," she gets out. 

"Bought 'em at the drug store yesterday," John says mildly, like they're candy or something. "Didn't know if I should, but they don't hurt to have around. Should've had 'em before, but... 's been a while."

That gets her biting down on her lip, which stings and feels clumsy under her teeth. She doesn't know what "a while" means for a guy, let alone one as solitary and downright ornery as John, and she doesn't know whether it makes her feel more excited -- that she's breaking some kind of chastity streak on his part -- or nervous. Nervous 'cause he's had to have sex with more people than her, way more times than her.

She's got foil tearing apart in her fingers a second later, and her knees practically tremble against John's as he slides between them and takes the packet from her.

"You don't have to worry. That's my job. And I'm gonna take care of you," he says, so low it sounds like a secret between them, an honest confession, and this is already the best sex Jo's ever had.

 

*

Just past midnight, they hit up the cemetery, by now trailing along behind the town like an afterthought. It's almost inky black out, only one house far up the road with a porch light on in back, this distant yellow twinkle. John kills the headlights anyway, just in case someone's watching out their window, and carefully pulls the truck up next to a thicket of trees on the edge of the lot.

Jo's sore in every way imaginable, and it's only getting worse as the day drags on, but it feels awesome to be so used. Used and useful. Spent, and just a little satisfied, too -- though it feels like she has an itch that can't possibly be scratched enough. How it feels when John touches her fades into nothing but a desperately groped-for memory all too fast.

Their flashlights stay carefully low to the ground, even though they're in the middle of nowhere, their only company an insistently hooting owl somewhere in the distance. Together they flash the face of headstones, most of them low and modest and carved into the face of otherwise misshapen rocks. The air still smells like sunshine on the warm grass and brush, summer heat still radiating from the soil under their boots.

Finally, Jo finds a Shappley gravestone, one of its corners cracked off and half-buried in the weeds and grass surrounding the stone.

"Laura Shappley," she pipes. The letters are nearly smoothed away. "'Beloved Mother and Wife.'"

John tosses her a shovel, then rounds her and considers the headstone next to the widow Shappley.

"Check it out. There's only two," Jo says, flicking the halo of her flashlight between the two graves and then twisting on the spot, briefly lighting up a Moore, a Leavell, a Huggins, three or four Pruetts.

"Okay," John says resolutely. "I'll take Mommie Dearest. You take Junior."

"I'll burn that bastard's bones," she grouses, pitching the shovel roughly into the grass-covered ground and stomping on it, urging it down jaggedly into the packed-tight, forgotten earth. "Pushin' me down the stairs..."

Barely an hour passes before Jo's dripping sweat. And only two feet down. Pathetic.

"Jeez," she huffs out between digs. There's dirt caked solid under her fingernails and streaked on her face already, and John's twice as far down as her. "Nothing like marathon fucking and digging up bodies to give a girl a workout."

John grins at her, or rather, down into his grave, but she can see the starlight glint on his teeth. It's kind of a rare sight, and unsettling there in the dark, like a wolf's smile.

"What?"

"You think that was a marathon."

It's all flatly amused, like John thinks she's being cute with him or something.

"Uh, yeah, kinda. Jesus. I didn't know you were into the whole Tantric sex thing, Sting."

John calmly tosses dirt over the ridge of his grave, rhythmic and patient.

"You've still got a lot to learn, sweetheart."

There is just no way in hell Jo should ever, ever get wet in the middle of digging up a rotted corpse, mere feet of soil between her and it. That is wrong. The wrongest thing yet.

Muscles shaking with exhaustion, Jo climbs out of the pit she's been digging the second John goes for the crowbar between their graves and says, "Flashlight."

She crawls over the grass, getting the night-warmed cylinder in hand and flicking it on for him, on her knees and one hand as she lights up the dirt-colored pine box John's straddling. He's much better at breaking these things open than she is; he's got the brute strength, has got his technique down. The wood cracks as he breaks the lid of the old pine box open, old rusty nails coming loose easy for him.

The body resting inside is about what you can expect from a body stuck in a leaky pine box for over a hundred years; Laura Shappley's mouth has fallen wide open, and her empty eye sockets stare up at them, up at nothing. For a moment, Jo wonders what her deal was -- why she's hanging around, still. If it's her son who's kept her here all these years.

John's hands plant themselves on either side of the grave, and one steel-toed boot helps him shove up and out, easy as you please.

"You know what to do," he says, dirty hand momentarily grasping at her leaning face. She grins at him, face lit by the muddy golden glow of the flashlight.

 

*

 

Even in the darkness, with the air conditioning roaring in its window setting, even exhausted beyond control and practically shaking and shivering from it, Jo's too hot and can't sleep, John's chest to her back, melting her down and making sweat pool in the pit of her spine. 

Still, tonight, she's not complaining, and John doesn't tell her to settle down and quit wiggling, either. He touches her shoulder blade, thumbs beneath her tank top and bra strap, sweeps her sweaty hair off her neck and sighs and smells like dirt and kerosene and sex. He turned off the light and slowly sat himself down beside her; took the blanket when she offered it. How can she sleep?

 

*

 

They put the Lake View Motel in the rear view the next morning, just squeaking in under checkout time, and it's the first time Jo's sort of sad to leave one of those rat-holes behind. It feels somehow like saying goodbye to the room where she was born, shaped into someone new.

Jo rests her chin in her hand on the counter, casually hiding the cut on her bottom lip with her hand. She's wearing a little green knit shirt that John had watched her put on with no small amount of satisfaction and has her freshly clean hair parted into reliable-looking plaits.

"You enjoy the Magic Fingers, little lady?" asks the guy behind the counter, obviously remembering her from days ago.

"Oh, she just loves Magic Fingers," John intones, unblinkingly signing the receipt with his fake name of the month. "Don't you, sweetheart."

"They're awesome," she chirps, and John pushes the receipt back at the clerk and smiles down at her before reaching out to tug at a braid.

Outside, the light and heat blaze off the pothole-riddled blacktop parking lot, and Jo fumbles for her three-dollar sunglasses as she stumbles to the truck. The monstrous thing is boiling inside after only a few minutes with the A/C off. It's like Hell on Earth, but Jo's body's humming so deep and warm that when John revs the engine, it's like she can feel it through her whole body. Like he's revving her up, too.

"Hungry?" John asks her.

"Starving."

An hour out onto the highway, John spots a diner set out awkwardly apart from a cluster of fast food restaurants and gas stations, like it's the uncool kid who isn't welcome in the kickball squares.

It's too early for dinner, even for senior citizens, so the place is practically empty as they walk in, and white light filters in everywhere it can past the old, faded paint on the windows.

"Well, hello there. Two?" asks the only waitress in the place, who seems surprised but delighted to see them.

"Booth, please," John says. It's as predictable as ever, but for some reason, it makes a smile long to tug at Jo's mouth.

They're seated in the very corner of the place, where there's a triangle of shade that the sun just can't reach, and provided straws and plastic cups of ice water that are already sweating. And even though all he does is pick up the menu, it's weird, because John's sitting there right across from her. Could stare right at her like she's staring right at him. It's like about a zillion other times, only somehow, Jo feels different now. She's not the same girl she was two weeks ago. Not at all. She plucks a menu hastily from behind the napkin dispenser.

"Let me guess what you're gonna get."

"What am I going to get?" John responds, low but surprisingly agreeable.

"Maybe... 'Ma's Meat Loaf.' Or, uh, 'Pa's Pot Roast.' But I'm thinkin' meat loaf."

"You are."

"Yup."

"Why's that."

"'Cause you always get stuff like that. Stuff like moms make. Comfort food. That," she teases, "and you're completely predictable."

"Am I."

"I knew you were gonna say that," she answers.

"What can I get for you?"

Ah, their waitress.

She's probably in her early forties, with a mousy blond bun and a baked-looking tan, but the peach uniform fits her nicely. Her nametag says Lucinda, and Jo just heard her loudly talking to the cook about her ex-husband being late with the child support for apparently the third and final time. John looks up at her, and it's nothing like how he looks at Jo -- how he looked at her just now, how he looked at her all sprawled open and fucked underneath him in bed, how he watched her give a spin in her slutty jeans for Carol at Sears and silently watches her pull on a new outfit every morning.

"I'll have the meat loaf," he says in that detached way of his. "And a cup of coffee."

"Meat loaf and a round of coffee." Lucinda nods agreeably, like that's the best order anyone could ever make, and looks down at Jo. "How 'bout you, sweetie pie? You ready to order?"

"She'll have iced tea," John pipes, shooting Jo a sly look. "Unsweetened. And a BLT. On toast."

"Fries?" asks Lucinda, glancing between them both.

"Mashed potatoes, if you have 'em," John says.

"We have 'em."

"Brown gravy," he finishes.

"I'll have that right out for you," Lucinda chirps, and sashays away in her Keds.

Jo crosses her arms and sits back in her seat, giving John a mock glare. Across the table, John just smirks at her till Lucinda brings his coffee mug and fills it for him.

"What, you think you know me now, or somethin'?" she half-jokes.

"Well, Daddy knows best, sweetheart," says John, straight into his black coffee, and Jo strips the paper off her straw so she can wrap it around her middle finger, pretending she's not blushing there in the booth.

 

*

 

Four days later, at a truck stop in Iowa, Jo shucks her jeans down only to find a bright crimson drop of blood soaked through the crotch of one of her new snowy-white pairs of underwear. She digs in her bag for a tampon, sweaty-palmed.

She must be either red-faced or white as a sheet -- it's hard to tell, with the mired summer heat and the bite of the air conditioning both getting at her at once and her head spinning, floating, disconnected from her body -- because the moment she slides back into the truck, John asks, "What is it?"

"Started my period," she says bluntly.

They stare at each other for a minute, till Jo breaks out into a relieved grin that pulls at her scabbed-over mouth, and a ghost of a smile echoes on John's.

"Growin' up so fast," he levels at her, so seriously she hauls up and punches him in the arm, tiny fist slamming uselessly into his bicep.

"Shut up!"

John laughs lowly, doesn't pay her a lick of attention as he pulls them back onto the highway, then reaches over and gives her knee a squeeze.

 

*

 

The thing is, if John would just go on with his bad credit card self and buy a laptop with one of those wireless thingies, the time it takes to find a new lead, not to mention research, would probably be cut in half. But he refuses for stupid reasons: no big purchases, no room in the truck, no time to find places to connect, you can't trust what you see on the internet anyway, blah blah blah.

Instead, he favors the hunter grapevine and scours newspapers, haunts local establishments ordering cups of coffee or beers or the Tuesday special and making what must sound like the weirdest small talk ever. He keeps one of those miniature notebooks around and pulls it out of his pocket and says he might be interested in writing about that for the _Times_ , or whatever. He paces around outside the room with his phone on his ear, hitting up his usuals to see if they've got anything for him. And he's great at it. His contacts, as wary as they are of her, seem to have no problem tossing him a bone. They know he'll get the job done. They know he's good, too. Jo can't remember how many times he's left her scrolling through microfiche at public libraries for weather reports, droughts and crop failures and electrical storms and cattle mutilations -- omens, he says -- and using a crawlingly-slow internet connection on a computer that blocks just about any kind of relevant search.

These times can be as frustrating as they are exhilarating, and Jo loves showing him he can depend on her wholehearted support, on how damn good her research is and how well she can connect case to case. Jo loves the hunt. Jo loves the road.

Jo loves the rev of John's engine and the way she can feel it all the way up through the core of her, the clutch of the seatbelt across her chest and the rosary hanging off the rear-view mirror and the way John rules the road, towering over most other drivers and passing by huge eighteen-wheelers like he's irritated they're daring to take up the road carting frozen foods. The sense of mission. The way John drowns himself in it and pulls her with him, fills her brain with the real, makes her feel like it's not some crazy thing to be ready and determined.

Hunting isn't the steadiest job in the world, but it has its own rhythm, and it overtakes the both of them.

It's kind of like phases of the moon -- the thin sliver of a lead, its promise, the way it waxes into travel, research, reconnaissance. At its fullest, Jo and John are usually awake to see the moon, too, mired so completely in what they're doing that it's not the least unusual for Jo to suddenly realize they haven't eaten in a day. That actually, she doesn't even know what day it is. As soon as one hunt wanes and ends, the next begins.

That's been John's rhythm, anyway, and since it's John's, it's hers, too. Nothing gets in the way of the hunt. Nothing's more important. It's fucking intoxicating.

They live cush on MasterCard's dime until the plastic's rejected at a shabby Kwik Star gas station.

"That was fast," Jo points out, slouching back in the passenger seat and popping her feet up on the dash, silently kissing the idea of a laptop goodbye.

"They're quick sometimes," John says, thumbing through the bills in his wallet. "I got another one coming, but it'll have to wait till we can get to Colorado. We'll have to depend on the kindness of strangers for a couple weeks."

"Oh, just let me at 'em," she says.

"That's my girl," says John.

 

*

 

That night, Jo winds up perched crookedly on a bar stool, doing her best stupid drunk girl impression, complete with attempting to tie a cherry stem in a knot with her tongue and failing because, _oh my God, I'm so too drunk for this!_ She keeps leaning dangerously over, like she's going to pass out on the grimy floor. And her mark, whose name is Randy, is totally giving her these impatient, full-body looks, like he's just waiting for her to pass out so he can drag her out to his jeep and date-rape her. She's wearing her best slutty clothes: a sparkly red tank-top and those jeans that are cut so low she's probably mooning the entire bar just sitting there.

"Teach me how to play pool," she begs him, over-the-top, aware of John sitting by himself in the corner booth, looking like all he cares about in the whole world is the college football they've got playing on all the TVs in the place.

Randy smiles at her, scoffs. "Nah... you don't wanna waste your time. The tables here can get pretty competitive."

"I bet you're really good at it. Teach me!"

"I'm the best. Let me buy you another drink instead," Randy suggests.

Jo reaches out to rest her hand on Randy's bicep and bats her eyes, slow and seductive and _I'm already totally smashed_. "C'mon," she coaxes. "I wanna learn from the _best_."

It isn't the first time she's used the tipsy bimbo ruse; it always works like a charm. Guys live to show off their skills, like it's some kind of aphrodisiac to all women around them if they score a goal or get a bullseye or whatever. She lets Randy lead her through a few shots, lets him lean behind her and move her hands across the worn green tabletop and explain the game to her like she's a complete idiot, and acts like she likes it. He smells like cigarette smoke and a sweaty jockstrap.

A few balls in, she lets herself sink one and lets out an excited, "Oh my God! I got one!"

"There you go," Randy says, close to her ear. "See, it's not so hard."

Calculated, Jo moves out from underneath him to make another easy shot, smiles at the drop of the ball into the pocket.

"I'm so gonna kick your ass," she informs Randy gleefully.

"Beginner's luck." Randy grins back.

"I bet you... fifty bucks I can beat you!" Jo says, slumping heavily over the table and purposefully letting the cue slip off her knuckles a couple of times as she lines up her shot.

"Fifty bucks?" Randy echoes, looking pretty tempted; he's probably thinking he can take it out of her in trade or something. Ew, gross. "You sure, baby?"

"I'm gon-na beat you," sings Jo, and happily misses a shot.

She gets laughed indulgently at.

While Randy circles the table to scope out his options, Jo lets her eyes wander to John, who's watching as if from a huge distance over his beer mug, eyes narrow slits that could be looking at just about anything in the place. She knows, though, that he's looking at her. Watching out for her, yeah, 'cause he always has in places like this, but more than that -- he's _watching_ her hustle this guy, watching her bend low, watching the red sequins on her tank top glitter under the Coors light and just barely hug her bare tits. John's watching the pit of her back when she bends over, watching her get totally felt up by this gross guy in a backwards baseball cap every time he leans over to "help" her. John's watching her play a totally different game.

And nobody in the whole joint knows how he's had her, touched every part of her. A brief, vivid fantasy of how it would feel to have John be the one bending her over the rim of the pool table and lining up her limbs, holding her hips, _fucking_ her flashes through her mind, totally unbidden, and a shiver crawls hotly over her skin.

Jo keeps close behind Randy for the rest of the game, but pulls out another bit of so-called beginner's luck at the end. She wins. Guys don't like to lose.

"Somebody owes me fifty bucks!" she coos at him, throwing an arm around his neck and swaying into him.

"Lucky shot," Randy groans at her, though he's obviously enjoying the way she clings at him.

"No way! I think I've got... y'know, like, natural talent," Jo slurs. "Let's play one more time... see if you can win back your fifty..."

Randy wraps beefy arms around her waist and stares down at her with a grin on his face. "Think you're gonna beat me again, huh? Better not."

"Maybe," Jo says, giggling, half with discomfort. "What are you, scared? Don't wanna lose to a chick?"

"Nah, I just don't wanna wipe the floor with such a hottie," Randy says, and Jo takes the opportunity to swat him right on the face, unfortunately too light for him to do anything but laugh like he actually enjoyed it.

"'Scuse me," a low voice intones next to them, and Randy swerves with Jo still in his arms toward it. Jo can practically feel the beer sloshing through his veins. John's standing there, leaning with one hand on the table. "You gonna use this table, or is it someone else's turn?"

Jo pouts up at Randy.

"Sorry, man. It's still in use," Randy tells him. Yahtzee. He fumbles for his wallet so they can play another round, and Jo just smirks at John, leaning on the pool cue and watching John slide himself onto a stool a few feet from them.

"I get to do the thing with the triangle," Jo pipes.

"You wanna rack the balls," Randy snorts.

"Yeah, that. With the triangle thingie."

She racks them out of order; Randy doesn't bother to right them, and instead just shakes his head and chuckles under his breath at her.

"Let's double it," Jo suggests, reeking of alcohol-related irresponsibility, and like the very idea of it is making her horny.

After a second, obviously as aware of John sitting there, suddenly their audience, Randy shrugs. "Your funeral, sweet cheeks."

Jo narrows her eyes and leans to break, _sweet cheeks_ echoing disgustingly in her head. _Sweet cheeks_ is why she sinks every damn ball, and _beginner's luck_ is the song she sings as Randy sighs and gives her every bill in his wallet before having to bum a couple of twenties off his buddies to make up for the rest.

"Fuckin' cocktease," he mutters as she flounces away with it.

"Gross," she grumps, meeting John out the back door half an hour later. "I smell like I suck at pool."

"Nice job," John says, and though both his hands are thrust into his pockets, Jo hands him the hundred and fifty dollars eagerly.

"Here."

"You keep that," John mutters. "You earned it."

"No way. That creep would've just molested me and tried to get me to go home with him all night if you hadn't gotten him to play me again. Jesus, why are college guys such assholes?"

The wad of cash, slightly grimy-feeling and smelling deeply of bars and body heat, just sits in Jo's hand for a minute before she huffs and divides it in half as best she can by the weak moonlight there in the back alley.

"Here. Big baby. That's half," she says, and stuffs it into John's jacket pocket, small fingers slipping in beside his and stuffing the bills into his uncooperative fingers. He doesn't seem to want to take them, and she stares up at him insistently. " _Take_ it."

He looks down at her for a second, registering the hard look on her face before obeying her and stuffing the wad of cash deeper into his pocket, which makes a warm relief wash through her. Yeah, they need this money -- he needs it, needs her -- and he knows it. She smiles up at him, her smuggest, and somewhere behind his mostly shuttered eyes, she's pretty sure there's that part of John that enjoys hoodwinking morons and sneaking up on her from behind smiling back in dark approval.

"C'mon," he murmurs, and wraps a warm, protective arm around her, leather heavy and sweet-smelling on her shoulders. "Let's get you home."

Home is the standard run-down motel room with double beds and a tiny foyer lined with amber glass globes; this one's got brown shag carpeting and a starburst-shaped golden clock on the wall that isn't actually functioning, hence the alarm clock with glaring red numbers sitting on top of the telephone book on the table squeezed between the beds.

John closes their door behind them, then speaks up.

"Those jeans are too tight for a young thing like you, sweetheart. I don't wanna see you wearin' them again."

Hypocrite. Like he wasn't checking out her ass all night.

"What're you gonna do if I put 'em on?" Jo asks teasingly, collapsing across her bed. "Take 'em right off me again?"

"For starters," John says, and sits himself on the bed across from her, lifting her leg and gripping at the sole of her boot so he can pull it off, not gentle enough to fool her.


	5. Chapter 5

The dirt is still brown in Blue Earth, Minnesota.

"How come I can't go?"

"'Cause I don't want you to," John says. "I need you to stay put, no questions asked."

"Can I at least ask when you'll be back?" Jo asks, slouching down till her knees are practically up over her head. With her arms crossed over her chest like this, she feels like a twelve-year-old again being forcibly driven to school by her mother.

"No, because I don't know that. And get your feet off the dash."

Jo lets her boots _clunk, clunk_ heavily, reluctantly, against the floor of the truck.

"I don't even know this guy," she points out, "and you want me to stay with him by myself? What if he takes advantage of me, huh?"

She'd punch him right in the eye socket, of course.

John drawls, "Oh, I think you'll be all right."

Just before sunset, they pull off Highway 169 before the rich, sun-fried amber fields start to become watered green lawns, and John follows a lonely back road to a stone church that's tucked unnoticeably against a gathering of green trees; it looks peaceful, not abandoned and sad like the churches Jo walked past in North Dakota. Its sign is still new and clean (BACK TO SUNDAY SCHOOL, it declares). Their truck roars at the silent building with its empty parking lot as they crunch along a gravel road past it to a small white-washed cottage with an array of motley flower pots gathered on its porch, green things shooting up and spilling over their rims. Whoever's inside obviously hears the engine, because a porch light flips on to welcome them, and a man dressed in black opens the door to lift a hand in a wave.

"You'll be safe here," John says, and sounds utterly convinced. "Jim's a friend. And he happens to live on hallowed ground."

It's only then, squinting at him curiously, that Jo sees the collar around Jim's neck. He's a preacher. It takes her a second to put it together: it's Jim Murphy. She relaxes, but only minutely. After all the stuff Jo's seen and done, she's not really one for the whole stairway to heaven thing.

"You'll be fine," John says. No buts. He does briefly touch her leg, hand huge as it slips over her thigh, over denim that's still so nice and new. "You can call me if you need me."

"Fine," she grumbles, and tugs her bags after her as she climbs down from the truck and walks up the treaded, tidied path toward the porch without looking back at him. And like her, John doesn't linger to watch her leave; he's already pulling away before she's even inside, his eyes on the horizon.

As she approaches, the preacher calls out, "Hello there." He's got slightly shaggy hair shot through with gray that's swept across his concerned-looking forehead, and he kinda reminds her of a tidied-up sheepdog. "Let me help you with those."

"I got 'em," she says, clutching at her stuff -- not that a man of God would take her precious Sears underwear.

"All right." Instead, he holds his door open for her, and she climbs up his cracked cement steps, weaves her way through the tiny jungle of all sorts of weird plants, and crams herself over his threshold. Her bags jab him in the stomach.

"Thanks," she mutters.

"So," Man of God says, oh-so-friendly, "when John asked if he could drop you off here, I didn't realize 'Joe' was a -- what, Josephine? Instead of a Joseph."

Jo inwardly flinches and mentally kicks John, who's disappearing down the highway.

"It's Joanna, but only my mom calls me that. You can just call me Jo."

It's then that Jo abruptly realizes that Jim isn't one of the people in the tentatively connected web of hunters that frequents Harvelle's. She stares up at the guy for a second, trying to remember if she's ever seen him before, but he just blinks back at her and offers her a smile, looking guileless. He doesn't know her any more than she knows him. She wonders if he's even a hunter.

Unlike most of John's other contacts, though, he reaches out to shake her hand, seeming old-fashioned and polite, and his grip is dry, warm, and friendly.

"I'll do that, then, Jo. Everyone around here calls me Pastor, or sometimes Father, but you can just call me Jim. How's that?"

"Deal."

Everything in Jim's modest and immaculately clean house looks like something someone's grandmother made forty years ago. The old brown couch is covered with a faded but still jarringly colorful patchwork quilt and several odd shaped pillows done up in orange, pink, and blue paisley, like all the worst the seventies had to offer, minus bellbottoms. The dark wood of the floor shines so clean that Jo feels kind of bad tromping on it in dusty boots, but Jim doesn't seem to mind at all. She peers around as he locks the door up behind them and then ushers her further inside; there's not a lot of art on the plain white walls -- though every other thing is covered with a frumpy crocheted lace doily -- but there's a crucifix over the doorway of the den. Jo eyeballs Jesus thoughtfully. He looks like he's got abs of iron.

"Well, I made up a bed for you upstairs," Jim says. "It's been a while since I've had anyone over for the night, so I hope it's comfortable."

"Yeah, well, I've been sleepin' in a truck half the time," Jo says, following Jim towards a narrow set of stairs. "Bet I'll have no complaints."

For some reason, Jo expected the second floor to be tiny, dark and full of discarded furniture and ripped curtains, like Cinderella's attic or something. But if anything, upstairs, it's a little more friendly and personal; framed and semi-ancient-looking photographs adorn the wall in an organized clutter, lots of old sepia-toned pictures of people Jo doesn't know, lots that look like they're from the seventies -- Jim with a fishing pole, dorky hat, and a layer of Nose-Kote, smiling with his arm around some other guy; Jim standing outside various churches clad in layers of formal priest's robes; Jim at Niagara Falls; Jim and that same guy in tie-dyed Grateful Dead t-shirts. Pictures of two little blonde kids, starting from babyhood to gap-toothed first grade portraits, smile at her from all over the place.

"My nieces and nephews," Jim explains, catching her taking it all in as he stops to open a bedroom door. "When they visit, this is where they stay."

It's little room with a single window looking out into the trees behind them, two twin beds with metal frames -- iron again, Jo's pretty sure -- and worn-looking quilts on them, and a little desk with piles of books on it, as if in lieu of a bookshelf.

"It's been a while," Jim says, "but John's kids used to stay here, too. So make yourself at home."

The words snag Jo's interest so hard she practically drops her duffel, and doubles up her arm to catch it as it slips from her shoulder.

John's kids.

Even stepping into the room feels weird, like one of them is going to suddenly appear right in front of her like a spirit and shove her back down the stairs, telling her she's not welcome. The beds suddenly seem different, knowing John's boys have slept in them; was the desk where they propped their feet up or scanned obits or sharpened knives? Did they read those books?

It takes her a second to shake it off, the strange black hole suck of the room and feeling John and John's family in it -- and how small and unimportant and random she must seem to Jim -- all of a sudden.

"Thanks," she repeats, and tosses her bags at the nearest bed. Oh, well. It's her room now.

"Of course," Jim replies, and bows slightly. "I bet you'd like to rest a bit. I'm making dinner if you're hungry, though."

"Uh, yeah, thanks."

"Come down whenever you're ready, then. Kitchen's not hard to find. Just follow the smell of church lady recipes and you're there."

"Yum," says Jo.

 

*

 

After changing into fresh clothes that smell a little less like the truck and a little more like last week's laundromat, Jo quietly wanders down the hall, searching for more clues as to whether Jim's even a player or not. She's figuring he's gotta be, but his house is the exact opposite of Bobby's, and even hers.

Looking carefully at the floor of the Roadhouse, you can find that there was once a gigantic devil's trap stained into the wood; the floor gets so dusty and sticky in there, and it's so old and worn down at this point that it must just look like random clumsy smears to most folks. Their police scanner -- which Ash scored for them online -- sits casually behind the bar. Sigils are on the walls behind dart boards. Half the tchotchkies sitting around are riddled with hoodoo carvings or markings if you look hard enough, even though they're all Greek to Jo. A few of the chairs are made of Palo Santo; her dad had made them himself. Demons would practically have to rig the place with dynamite and blow it sky-high like every _Loony Tunes_ bit just to get into it.

And Bobby doesn't even pretend to have some semblance of normalcy. It's obvious from the second you walk in that he's a hunter, with all the junk he's got sitting around in plain sight. Or at least a paranoid old freak.

But Jim's house is so clean, so orderly, and so devoid of lunar charts and ponderings scribbled on paper and stuck to the wall like a gigantic map of thoughts. The living room has comfy-looking old couches with lots of boring-looking religious books stuffed in the cases flanking its little fireplace. She passes a doorway that opens up to a study, where there's even more books and a desk and a computer, and finally, some official-looking documents hung on the walls, like Jim's some sort of doctor. However, everywhere she looks: iron. Iron bed frames, iron crucifixes sitting innocently on shelves and in alcoves, iron tools around the hearth.

"Get the lay of the land?" Jim asks her cheerfully when she appears in the kitchen doorway. He's got something going in a pot. It doesn't smell half bad, and the kitchen is cozy, with lace curtains opened around a line of plants sitting in the window, an odd riot of color -- greens and yellows and oranges, some weedy and some carefully tended to -- against the stark white of everything else.

"Yup. Nice place," Jo says, and fidgets.

"It's home," Jim says simply.

Jo seats herself in a wooden chair with an ornately carved back, legs slouching apart lazily, and picks at her own fingernails nervously while Jim serenely cavorts himself between countertop, fridge, and stove, where he's got a big blue pot on the burner. It smells delicious and warm, home-cooking indescribably different than Bobby's leftovers pulled from the back of his fridge and two-dollar sandwiches wrapped in plastic and even freshly-served pancakes at diners.

"So," she finally pipes, bursting the bubble of bachelor silence, "how d'you know John?"

"Oh, we've been friends for many years now."

Simple. No details. Dismissive. It's exactly like something John would say, only a heck of a lot more polite.

She tilts her head and eyeballs him intently.

"You in the game?"

Jim pauses, meets her intent gaze, then chuckles with a rueful note in his voice, "Well... let's just say I'm quite familiar with it."

"You're a hunter?" she repeats, done with the run-around version of twenty questions.

"Hm. In some ways. More than a hunter, I'm a seeker, you could say. I sought the truth... I found the truth. I continue to seek truth. And I was put on this earth to help others, save souls. So I do what I can to help those in pain, the dead and the living."

Oh, Lord.

"Not gonna try and save my soul or somethin', are ya?" Jo asks him, half laughing.

Jim laughs right back, not seeming offended. He's got a rack of paisley potholders on the wall next to him. "Depends. Does your soul need saving?"

"My soul's just fine," Jo says staunchly, although truthfully, she doesn't think any preacher would agree.

"So. You hunt," Jim says, and it's somehow both a statement and a question, politely curious and a little doubtful. "You hunt with John."

"Yep."

"On the phone, he referred to you as his partner. I was surprised -- I mean, I haven't heard much from John the past year or two, but I never expected he'd take on a partner. He's always said that he'll never make that mistake again."

"Yeah, that sounds like him," Jo says, and even though she can feel her eyes rolling of their own accord, she knows it's true. That, as much of a help as she can be to John, she's like extra weight sometimes. She holds him back. Drags him down. He'd rather leave her behind sometimes -- just like now. Still, that word, _partner_ , lingers in her ear. Because that doesn't sound at all like John. She adds, even though it stings her pride some, "I wouldn't say we're partners."

That makes Jim stop momentarily.

"So -- would you say you're his protégé?"

"Sorta. I dunno," Jo responds, feeling transparent somehow, or like she's lying or something, when really, she doesn't even know exactly what she and John are anymore. He just sort of makes her heart hurt and beat in cruel ways, and frustrates her with longing and makes her feel safe and unsafe at the same time, teaches her and takes her and shows her how little she really knows about the world and about herself. 

"He must be sort of like a mentor for you. A father figure?"

Jo's brain drags up an awful snapshot montage of all the times she and John have pulled the father/daughter ruse on cops, on victims, on waitresses at diners and salesladies at Sears -- of all the times she's liltingly called him _Daddy_ when she's being someone else, and the times _Daddy_ 's come tearing out of her from some empty place.

"Uh, no, definitely not that."

"Oh? Then what?"

"He's..." She struggles for a second, trying to find the right words, ones Jim won't condemn. "He's like a drill sergeant one second and a teacher the next and -- a friggin' emotionless robot from outer space the next..."

At that, Jim smiles at his countertop and gives her a chuckle, but it doesn't seem like it's because anything she said was pleasing or amusing to him. "I see."

After a minute of sorting through vegetables that look like they're fresh from a garden, still earthy from it, he speaks again.

"John is always struggling to do the best he can. Just like we all do." 

It sounds totally like something a preacher would say.

"I know he can be harsh. Stubborn. Impatient. I've known him to make unwise decisions in the heat of the moment and lose his temper, lose himself. He keeps a tight grip on certain things... things that he cares about... and because of that, he loses his grip on other things. I've seen him lose friend after friend and soldier on... and sacrifice a lot to do what he does. He carries around a lot of pain, but he doesn't like to share it. It comes out anyway, of course. But deep down, under all the rest of that stuff, John is a good man. He cares, despite how he comes off. He cares deeply about what he does, and he cares about the people in his life, even if he has trouble expressing it. If he's decided to teach you, I'm sure it's because he sees something in you, and I'm sure you're in good hands."

For a minute, it's so silent that Jo becomes abruptly aware that whatever Jim is cooking is bubbling gently in the big blue pot and that there are cicadas humming in the distance, because she's so shocked to hear someone describe John like that that she doesn't even breathe.

She's heard everything from her mom calling him _that man_ like he's a stranger or a criminal to other hunters touting him as _Johnny-boy, always gets the job done, best damn hunter in the States_ more like an inhuman legend. None of the other hunters she'd ever met while shadowing John tenaciously had ever spared her the kindness of thinking she could do this job, ever acted like John was doing anything other than digging his own grave by taking on Ellen Harvelle's impulsive, irresponsible runaway daughter.

Noticing her frozen there in at his kitchen table, Pastor Jim shakes his head. "It isn't my place to talk about John like that. I just hope you don't resent him, as others have. He's not as unfeeling as he seems."

"Yeah, I know," Jo murmurs, especially because her skin can remember the feeling of his against it, sweaty and thrumming with heartbeat and his fingers sliding against her jaw.

"You remind me a little of him, actually... no-nonsense -- ah. Ah. Perfect. I think we're done." Grabbing two loud paisley potholders, Jim shifts the pot from the burner quickly. "I haven't had the occasion to make this in a while. I hope you'll be able to eat it. Don't get the chance to cook for others all that often."

"Smells good," she offers.

In a clean white bowl with blue milkmaids and cows circling the rim in a lazy parade, Jim serves her soup, its golden broth loaded with circles of bright orange carrots like so many little suns and little pale half-moon pieces of celery. Rice swirls around juicy-looking pieces of chicken.

"Chicken soup?" Jo asks sardonically, batting her lashes up at Jim. "Is it for my soul?"

Jim laughs. "Something tells me you don't need chicken soup for the soul."

 

*

 

It's hard to sleep when there aren't cars passing irrhythmically on the highway right outside the window -- when there are crickets chirping somewhere, when John is out without her. Somewhere inside Jo lurks the irrational fear that John will someday never come back. After twisting the heavy old brass lock on the bedroom door shut and before clicking off the bedside lamp, Jo checks her phone. No messages. No missed calls. She lets her thumb scroll to _Daddy_ for a strange minute, then huffs and snaps the thing shut.

There's no dutiful alarm clock like at motels, so she has no idea what time she finally drifts off to sleep or what time it is when she wakes up -- all she knows is that it's dark and eerily silent, except for the quiet clicks of someone picking the lock on her bedroom door.

Her mind flies to Jim -- no way...

But of course, it's John who quietly opens the door, slowly, stopping still at even the faintest creak. It's dark out in the hallway; moonlight lights his silhouette, so familiar to her now.

"Jesus. Jerk," she mutters, feeling her heart settle from its jump into her throat and thump heavy against her ribs. "You could've knocked."

"Shh," is John's reply.

She waits for him to step inside and shut the door behind him again, hears that heavy latching lock slide into place in the darkness.

"What'd you find?" she whispers, easing herself up. The mattress creaks seriously loudly, but then, maybe the cricket symphony outside is louder. John moves, his face cupped by moonlight on one side.

"Nothin,'" he says lowly. "Go back to sleep."

"You go to sleep," she replies childishly, feeling like her brain is still half asleep and half on high alert. Of course he found _nothing_ , if he wouldn't even tell her what he was looking for in the first place and why she couldn't come look with him.

"Was just checkin' on you," John says, nearer now, at her bedside. A moment later, his fingers are in her hair.

"And practicing your lock-picking?" she asks archly, even though her whole body aches to be up against his suddenly. Wrong place, wrong time -- it's always wrong, how she responds.

"Somethin' you could stand to do more of," he returns, voice gruff, in the very pit of his throat and almost forgotten there with the way he moves to kiss her, both hands grasping her face. The rasp of his beard is raw and unfriendly, and against her cheek, his ring is unexpectedly cool.

Jo responds openly for a moment, forgetting where they are in the total permission of the touch, and her tongue's barely brushed John's when she remembers and jerks back with a small gasp. "John -- downstairs, he -- we're practically in a church --"

The way that makes him laugh and drawl, "You get to take a look at Jim's actual church?" sends an odd shiver down her spine, sort of scary and thrilling at once. "Nothing holy about it. He's got the best arsenal for miles. And this house is the safest place I know of. You saw the coriander and fennel he's got growing on the front porch, right? The hemlock's in back."

"For spell work," she whispers weakly, only just realizing what's been under her nose all along -- the fact that she's practically been staying in a well-stocked, spirit-proof bunker what with the hallowed ground, powerful plants everywhere, iron and crosses in every room -- and John grunts a low, assenting noise. "I noticed all the iron..."

"There's protection sigils under both these beds," he tells her.

"Wow. You're -- seriously over-protective," she manages to tease.

"Mm. My job to protect you," John says flatly. "Now go back to sleep."

His hands are still in her hair, his thumbs taking up the sides of her face. She rasps when she says, so close to him, right to his face, "I don't want to go back to sleep. And I don't want you to protect me."

She kicks her blanket off, and even though it's something a petulant child would do -- and all that is something that makes her sound like a pouting second-grader having a tantrum -- it feels fucking sexy to open herself to him, pull him to her blindly by what feels like the soft, defeated lapel of his collar.

The skinny twin mattress is not near big enough for him, let alone the both of them, and it creaks like it's dying when John sinks a knee onto it, kissing her down into her pillow. But the iron frame is sturdy and doesn't even shake as his body covers hers and he whispers, "Tell Daddy what you do want, sweetheart."

"I want you to fuck me," she pleads back, her bare legs hugging around his hips. His jeans are so thick and rough; he's so solid. She can feel the zip on his jeans thrillingly and frustratingly close to where she could just grind up against him, even through their clothes, and eventually come just needily riding the heavy ridge of his zipper, held down by him.

"You do," John mutters, and his hand sweeps up her side, hot through the cotton of her tank top. "Tell me what you're wearing. Can't see you well enough."

Perv, Jo thinks on autopilot, but just the thought of him perving on her is enough to get her indescribably overheated.

"Tank top. Panties," she reports, and John's hand wanders back down to clutch at her bare thigh.

"Which ones?" he asks, his fingers sliding all slow and luxurious up the muscle of her thigh as she clenches it, clenches him to her.

"I dunno. White ones. Blue tank top. Light blue."

"Nothin' else?"

"No," she breathes, hitches out, "Daddy," and her belly practically quivers just saying it.

John exhales, and she feels it, warm and wet, a full-bodied breath against her neck; the grit of his beard is warm as his face butts and moves against hers and his hand smoothes its way up her ribs, nothing between their skin. Her nipple's stiff and aching against the line of sweat in his palm as he grasps her tit -- what little there is, covered totally by his hand. Jo flushes, but she can't even tell whether she's hot to be touched or just embarrassed.

"Gonna get your panties all wet for me?" John drawls, and fiddles roughly with her nipple, catching it between two fingers and pulling it until it slips from their pinch and Jo's flinching and hissing from the painful-edged tug of arousal in her cunt. "You gotta be quiet," he tells her, deadly serious. "If you can't keep quiet, I'm gonna stop."

"Okay," she whispers, all too quickly, and oh, God, does she fucking regret it the minute his mouth gets around the obvious point of her nipple, sucking it right through the thin cotton of her tank top. Her insides all strain viciously, making her grit her teeth and reach up and grab onto the iron bars of the headboard for bearing.

That just sends John downwards, his mouth briefly nipping at the dip of her stomach. Fingers slide, huge and demanding, between her legs, rubbing her panties up against her pussy until he can feel how wet Jo is, and he sighs harshly, like he didn't expect it. Jo's eyes are closed so tight she's seeing bright splotches like stars, vision blacked so much it's going white again, but she rolls her hips up at him, wanting his thumb to slide over her clit, and the mattress squeaks softly.

"Yeah, honey," he growls. "Gonna get you nice and wet."

Those fingers push her panties aside, and she's expecting one to find its slick, easy way inside her, aching for it, biting down on the way her own want is trying to explode out of her --

Instead, John grips at her knee, firm and commanding, presses her apart, and laps his tongue into her pussy, sudden and hot and frightening, and Jo screams silently in the back of her throat, her mouth dropping open for the noise that never gets out. It's too much -- too much feeling, too invasive, his chin and its week-old beard sliding against her skin, warm wet tongue opening her up like she's ripe and smearing her own juices with a slick noise she can _hear_.

"John, no," she gasps out, round but voiceless, and this is only the second time this has ever happened to her, and it's just as unexpected and alarming as the first time. Her legs are locked tight and shaking and she can't stop them, but John just flattens his hand against her thigh like he's holding her down and licks at her, sucks at her, mutters, _it's okay, sweetheart_ at her endlessly, till she's come and come again and tears are burning in her eyes and running down her temples, wetting her pillow while her come smears over the sheet, John's mouth, the insides of her thighs.

By the time he drives fingers into her, it's more of a full, comforted feeling than anything, and he slowly pushes the slightly sweet tang of her own pussy into her mouth as he finger-fucks her slowly. She can't even taste it on his mouth, on his tongue, by the time she's shuddering from deep inside and John seems satisfied to let her pass out.

 

*

 

Morning dawns dark, making it feel like an extended night; Jo sleeps on and on, comfortable, the smell of John still on the mattress even though he's long gone, the sigil under her bed making her feel safe and oddly at home. Even though it's past noon by the time she's up and at 'em, it feels like late evening.

She finds Jim sitting behind his desk in his study, listening to the radio with a pen in one hand. He's not wearing his clerical black, and it's funny to suddenly see him dressing like a shluppy college student, in a t-shirt with a brown flannel shirt over that.

"Good morning," he says, lifting his eyes attentively. "Sleep well?"

Oh, awkward. 

Jo smiles, wide and stupid. "Super good, thanks. Super comfortable."

"Good," Jim says, and sounds genuinely pleased, which probably means he slept through John creeping in, picking her lock at God knows when in the morning, and all in all trying his best to get her to scream and wake him up.

"Sure is dark today," Jo comments.

"Storm's rolling in," Jim informs her. "I've been listening to the weather all morning. I've also got a barometer on the wall over here..."

He stands, and Jo takes that as an invitation to step into Jim's office. Like the rest of his house, it's neat as a pin, but also feels lived in, like Jim got everything he owns from random junk stores and church yard sales or his grandmother or something. There's a collection of crucifixes on the wall, some sort of ugly with agony, and several very pretty, with ornate carvings or curlicues. There's a threadbare Persian carpet with Celtic knots in faded gold and silver spanning the floor, and oddly, a dreamcatcher and a few beaded rosaries hanging from the same peg on the wall. The barometer on the wall by the window is a dull brass dial that looks like an ornate clock, only it's got about a billion numbers on it, and the single needle's just wandering all around the whole thing randomly, jumping before Jo's eyes.

"Uh, what the hell does that mean? That it's spinnin' all over like that?" she asks. Maybe it's just the crazy atmospheric pressure, but it's like watching a compass spin endlessly, never able to find where north is, lost and confused, and it makes her skin prickle over uncomfortably.

"Oh, well, probably not much. The air pressure's changing fairly rapidly. There's definitely a storm on its way. The needle tends to wander even on days with steady weather," Jim says, leaning back against his desk and folding his arms over his chest. He's wearing jeans and Birkenstocks and suddenly looks like a total hippie, or at least former hippie.

Then something occurs to Jo. "Would an electrical storm make it move like that?"

"That all depends."

"On what?"

"On what's causing the storm," Jim says.

"That is so not a good enough answer."

"Would you like to talk about salvation through the Lord, Jesus Christ, instead?" he offers, and there's a mischievous slant to his smile.

"Haha... okay. No, thanks. My eternal soul would be up for some more chicken soup though, if you got any."

Jim grins like a kid who just got one over on her and says, "Sure, c'mon. I'll heat you up some. Quietly, though. John's still asleep."

Jo's skin prickles again; she kind of expected him not to be there, to have gone out searching again for whatever it was he was looking for. Jim leads her through the living room to the kitchen again, and there's John, asleep on the couch under the patchwork quilt of many colors. His boots are still on, and he's snoring vaguely, face tucked into the corner of the arm. 

 

*

 

In spite of the storm, they leave Pastor Jim's in the middle of the dim gray afternoon, purple clouds still thick in the sky and blocking out the sun. Jo dutifully carries a few small jars and bundles of herbs and plants from Jim's kitchen, ginger and careful in her arms, to tuck them in a duffel in the back of the truck.

"What do we need these for?" she asks.

"Just in case," John says evasively. It doesn't look like he slept at all, and as the wind rustles around strangely, it whips his untidy hair this way and that.

She needs to just stop asking questions.

Up in her room, or John's kids' room, or whatever, Jo stuffs all her belongings back in her duffel and eyes the place for signs John was ever even in there. Every time he comes to her, touches her, it's like a dream brought on by her own wants, hard to accept and remember as real. The other little bed is still neat. Curiously, Jo ducks to a knee, pulls up its prim lace bed skirt and peers underneath, finding the pale curve of a sigil drawn in chalk there on the floor.

Before she makes it out the front door for the final time, her own bags over her shoulder and her hair still damp on her shoulders from the shower she grabbed, Jim stops her with a hand on her arm.

"How's your Latin?" he asks.

"Uh, pretty awful," Jo says honestly, blinking at him. "Why?"

"If there's one thing you're gonna want to learn," Jim tells her, "it's how to make holy water. I taught John myself. Have him teach you. And take this, you'll need one of your own. My gift to you."

When she doesn't immediately hold out her hand, Jim politely takes it and pats something into it, keeping her hand in his for a couple of seconds and smiling at her. It feels weirdly like he's blessing her or something, being a priest and all, and when he lets her go, Jo finds a rosary in her palm -- the prettiest she's ever even seen, at that, with delicate beads that shimmer iridescent, pink and peach and silver, shaped almost imperceptibly into hearts. The crucifix and sacred heart centerpiece are shining white enamel.

"Seriously?" she asks, breath catching. "You want me to take this?"

"Yes. I make them in my spare time, so I have plenty. Take it. Please."

"It's really beautiful," Jo says simply.

"And don't forget to brush up on your Latin. End sermon. Take care, Jo."

She gets that unfathomable smile again.

"Thanks, Jim. You too."

Once she's safely hitched herself up into the passenger seat of the truck and in its familiar surroundings, Jo considers the rosary for a second, glinting and gorgeous in her hand. The more she looks at it, the more she feels like it _is_ a blessing. Not a religious blessing, or a fortuitous gift, but a sign of acceptance, encouragement. Finally, one of John's contacts recognizing her as a part of the game in her own right.

She loops it a couple of times over the rear view mirror with John's, where they tangle pleasantly, hers delicate and girly-looking next to the big bloody-red beads on his.

John notices it pretty much the second he's climbed up beside her.

"That yours?"

"Jim said to brush up on my holy water skills, or lack thereof," Jo informs him.

"Your Latin is pretty crap," John acknowledges, pumping the shift into drive without looking back at Jim, who's standing on his porch, staring up at the dark sky, wind making his flannel billow. Jo watches him for a moment, then takes her eyes off the rear-view mirror and focuses on John.

"Whose fault is that? Gimme a lesson, maybe I'll improve," she replies. Then, playfully, Jo trills, "Teach me, teach me! Master of Latin! I'd just _love_ to learn from the best..."

Briskly, John says, "Guess sanctifying is a good a place to start as any. Repeat after me. _Exorcizo te._ "

" _Exorcizo te._ "

They make it all the way to the tongue-twisting _ut fias aqua exorcizata_ bit before rain starts to beat down on the roof of the truck.

 

*

 

A few hours out, the radio fritzes into havoc. They're the only ones batshit enough to be out on the highway as white lightning fractures the sky, veining through it for brilliant flashes that light up the fields around them and make the sheets of pouring rain glisten and dance against the pavement. John stops under the first overpass he sees and stares out at the storm over the steering wheel.

"We're in the middle of an omen," he mutters, face momentarily lit with a boom of lightning. "Where are the damn cattle mutilations?"

"Is that what you were out looking for yesterday?"

"No, not specifically. There just aren't any. Not that I've found."

"Please, God, just one little cattle mutilation," Jo jokes, and John gives her hair a stern _stop your sassing already_ pull. Then he tries his cell phone, which doesn't get any better reception than the radio, and cusses irritably. 

"We'll wait it out," she assures him. "Give it twenty minutes. ... I think they're playing REO Speedwagon."

The airwaves are full of nothing but static, an alien-sounding pitch, and second-long snatches of voice, unidentifiable.

John says distantly, "REO. Reminds me of your dad."

Out the window, it goes light as day for a split second, then dark, wet, and empty.

She's always known that John knew her dad -- and can remember his face from her own past, too, but it seems like some other person; the guy sitting next to her isn't just some Uncle John, like how all her dad's buddies were blood brothers somehow. She had more uncles who indulged her with quarters for Shoot Out and pinball when she was a kid than she remembers now. Jo watches her own fingers trace the metal ash tray set in the passenger side door, where she's started a new collection of straw wrapper rings, and says, "Me, too."

When she was twelve, she would've pinned both elbows on the poker table and peered with big eyes up at Uncle Daniel or Uncle Jake and wheedled, _You knew my dad? Really? What do you remember about him?_ Then she'd write it all down in her journal. _He told me my father sure did love me, and that he could throw a dart and hit the same spot twice in a row, his aim was so good. I'm gonna practice till I'm that good._

But she's never asked John about her father. Not once. Maybe she's outgrown questions at this point. Or maybe she doesn't want to share him with anyone anymore.

Man, can she fucking play darts, though.

John lets her lean her cheek on his shoulder as they watch the storm, and though his hands stay braced on the steering wheel and his own knee, he nudges his mouth against her hair.

 

*

 

Weeks blur. Whatever lead Jim had thrown to John, it was obviously a dead end, because they head east.

One morning, she wakes up in Pennsylvania, the closest to New York and, indeed, the east coast, as she's ever been, and John's coming in the door with two coffees in hand and his big ol' jacket on.

"Better bundle up today," he says. "Cold front comin' through."

"What...?" 

Cold air slides off John's jacket right onto her bare skin as she takes the coffee he hands to her, and he scrunches a hand into her hair for a second, messing up her ponytail even further.

"We got a lot of ground to cover," he continues. "You still have that list of victims? You go through it till you got the names memorized, first and last. You need to be able to talk about them all, just in case somebody asks you what you're doing there --"

"This isn't coffee," Jo interrupts, the odd sweetness to the heat burning her tongue making her pull a face.

"It's hot chocolate," John says.

"You think you're so cute," Jo mumbles. "Weirdo."

She kind of loves just how much of a weirdo John actually is, but it's not like she's gonna give him the satisfaction of knowing it. Looking up at his hunched shoulders and dark brow and the dimple settled in his cheek -- distinct there even when he's not smiling -- and knowing how he is, standing there... and how he is when he's fucking her, fucking _with_ her to get a rise out of her and make her come like it's his favorite hobby... there's a weird disconnect. But then, Jo's kind of like that, too. She doesn't quite fit in either. She's not quite normal. She gets off on everything he throws at her even harder than he does, and he knows it, that jerk.

The way they fuck is totally random and bi-polar, sandwiched between jobs most often -- 'cause after forty-two hours awake and ransacking libraries and staking out locations and desecrating graves, neither of them have the energy to do anything but fall into whatever bed -- but sometimes shoehorned aggressively in right in the middle of one.

Following his lead, it's like she goes through a sex growth spurt, sometimes with aches and pains and all, going from a fumbling, wiggly kid to feeling like a woman.

John's the first to put her on her hands and knees and fuck her so deep it feels like he bruises her inside. He's the first to press her down to her stomach and make her go tight and wail into the mattress and the first to snag her knee over his shoulder and nearly fuck her in half. He's the first to roll her clit under his fingers while his cock's sliding in her, rubber slick with her come. He's the first guy who ever goes down on her, usually after she's already jerked and shuddered and dripped all over but sometimes just for the fun of it, or something. It freaks her out and she doesn't know why, except that no one else has ever done it, and the moment she admits it to him, she gets a dark quirk of a smile.

He's the first guy she ever determinedly tries to return the favor for, and it's so painfully obvious, but John tells her exactly what he wants, holds her hair, and pants, "Good. Just like that."

It's ridiculous how those words are all she wants. Not _I love you._ Not _Forever._ Just _Good job._

Stuff doesn't change so much, except now that she's actually got a bunch of clothes, Jo spends more time in states of half-dress and butt-naked than dressed, which is kind of hilarious but which is good when it comes to laundry, also known as just about John's least favorite hobby.

But apparently he likes to hang there against the nearest doorway, hands shoved in his pockets, and watch her go through her stuff and watch her strap her bra on, step into her panties and pick out what she's going to wear that day. He likes to say stuff like, "Better wear somethin' cute," or "It's gonna be wet out." It's like seeing the other side of the control freak coin, or like he's a pendulum swung hard from _I'm not involved and I don't care_ to _yeah, looks cute on you._

She'd be fucking lying if she said none of this turns her on, just like every single time John orders for her, decides what she's gonna drink, tells her what to do and gives her a task to complete for him -- anything from combing papers to sharpening knives to keeping her eyes on a dark, dead window in case there's the promising flicker of life. It all turns her on.

Sometimes he undresses her from head to toe, pulls her boots off and undoes each individual pearlized button, fingers big and too rough to be touching them or the cowgirl-style gingham printed on thin cotton. He's realized how fucking self-conscious she is about her tits and kisses her between them, stubble scratching her skin, and says, "C'mon, honey. Let me see 'em." Pries the hook of her bra open and pulls it all the way down her arms, or at least hooks his finger into a cup to trace her nipple.

"Names of the victims?"

"Mmm." She slumps back nakedly with her hot chocolate, licking her lips -- her tongue always wants to settle in the dent where her lip split. She can still see the names circled in heavy blue by John's hand, till the ink had soaked through the back of the newspaper, but her brain's stuck on sneaking a _Daddy_ all innocently at him. "Tyler, Jeremy... Hamilton, Jordan... Derrick... something upper-middle-class and ultimately forgettable..."

"Study."

"I'll get it," she yawns. "This stuff is too sweet."

John tosses her manila folder of clippings, left open on the unused bed, at her. "I'm not letting you live on coffee. Where's your jacket?"

"Probably in the back of the truck."

"I'll get it. You're gonna need it."

When they venture outside, it's chilly; Jo can see her breath puff and hover, silvery against the glimmering, far-off sunrise, and pulls her denim jacket in close around her. She hasn't worn it yet, but the new smell is gone. It smells like the truck, the road, gas stations and metal. The never-ending hunt.

 

*

 

It's in Pennsylvania that Jo accidentally meets one of John's kids.

Kind of.

Four of John's old cell phones sit in his glove compartment. He throws the oldest away every time he gets a new one, but every now and then, one of the old ones will ring, and he'll wait until it rolls to voice mail, then cautiously check it to see who's trying to contact him.

She sits in the truck with the heat on, socked feet against the dash because it's rumbling and warm and a flashlight in hand so she can keep on studying her Latin, while John meets with a local guy who supposedly has a tip on some kind of demonic possession the likes of which Jo's only heard of coming right out of Hollywood's ass. She's never seen a possession, but Bobby just called about one down in Texas, and now there's this one, and John's talking to the worried husband. The demon took the woman's body all the way down to Florida, where it ran into Steve Wandell and abruptly vacated its ride. She can see John in the living room through the front window of the little house, sitting tensely on the edge of a couch with his hand locked to his chin. He's been in there for an hour already. The husband keeps crying.

Somewhere under her feet, one of John's phones rings.

She has absolutely no impulse to answer it, having noticed him always letting it go to voice mail, but it rings insistently through two, three, four whole cycles of rings. Then, whoever it is calls yet again.

Before it goes to voicemail for the fifth time, Jo pops open the glove compartment and grabs to feel which phone is the one that's ringing.

The call button beeps as she picks up, but she's barely got it to her ear, let alone said, "Hello?" before a voice is jabbering at her.

"Dad! Finally. Listen, it's not a spirit or a zombie or any of that crap. It's a bonafide curupira, and it's got a friggin' _family_. There's, like, six of them! Can't believe it took me this long to get the facts straight. You still in Minnesota? 'Cause I could really use a hand, here --"

"Who's this?" Jo interrupts.

There's a pause, then the person on the other end asks, "Who's _this_?"

"You trying to get ahold of John?" she asks, eyeing John's profile, blurry with the distance and the plates of glass between them.

"How'd you get your hands on this phone," the guy demands, and it's not even a question. It sounds just like John at his most impatient; it makes her heart catch strangely in her chest.

She doesn't answer the question exactly. "He's got a new one."

"Aw, jeez."

"You need the number?" 

"Uh... yeah. Jesus. Dad..." the voice veers off in annoyance.

"'Kay," Jo says, fumbling in her jacket pocket for her own phone, never far from her side these days. "Hang on, I got it right here."

"Who'm I talkin' to?"

She flips through her contacts until _Daddy_ is selected.

"Just -- a friend."

"Don't sound like any friend I know," says the guy, sounding dubious.

She gives him John's new number, listens to him repeat it once and hang up on her after a short, tacked-on, "Thanks." Wonders who that was. Whether it was Dean or his other son. She still doesn't know which one's which.

 

*

 

Maybe it's the fact that John still talks to his kids that makes Jo stand in front of a rack of postcards in a truck stop in the panhandle of Oklahoma for twenty minutes. They're colorfully displayed one of those wire racks, and she spins it around with futile shoves that make the reluctant rack squeak loudly.

Get Your Kicks on Route 66. All Signs Point to Sapulpa. Greetings from Indian Territory. Come to Green Country.

There are shots of highways, orange and purple sunsets and prairies, the little crackerbox skylines of tiny Midwestern towns, Native American drums made of animal hide and feathers scrawled over with fluorescent letters with that cliché quote about dancing to the beat of your own drum -- like this isn't the buckle of the Bible belt.

That's the one she winds up picking out and paying fifteen cents for. It's kind of funny.

Later, waiting in a room at the Red Man Inn, Jo uses a pen with the motel's logo printed on its side to write on the back of the post card, not sure what to say after all this time.

> _Mom,_
> 
> _In Oklahoma. Doing good. Keeping safe. Been thinking about you a lot. I miss you and Harvelle's and even Ash. But I love it out here. I love the road. The job. And I'm learning so much. Sure beats college._
> 
> _I'll drop you another postcard soon, promise. And I'll be back as soon as you put The Bangles back in the jukebox._
> 
> _Love,  
>  your pain-in-the-ass prodigal daughter_

**Author's Note:**

> Eternal thanks to my precious betas, Pea and Paige. I literally cannot thank you two enough for your input, keen eyes, generous feedback, green font, and ROFLing at Bobby. Your sweet lovin' was by far my favorite part of this entire Big Bang experience and I will never forget it and I have no idea how to express how much you actually did for me. Thank you.


End file.
